Soccernomics
Ratings13
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings13
Average rating3.9
At last, football has its answer to Freakonomics, The Tipping Point and The Undercover Economist. Why do England lose?" "Why do Germany & Brazil Win?" "How have Spain conquered the World?" "Penalties - what are they good for?" "What is the price on achieving success and the true cost of failure?" These are questions every football fan has asked. Soccernomics (previously published as Why England Lose) answers them. Written with an economist's brain and a football writer's skill, it applies high-powered analytical tools to everyday football topics. Soccernomics isn't in the first place about money. It's about looking at data in new ways. It's about revealing counterintuitive truths about football. It explains all manner of things about the game which newspapers just can't see. It all adds up to a new way of looking at football, beyond clich�s about "The Magic of the FA Cup", "England's Shock Defeat" and "Newcastle's New South American Star". No training in economics is needed to read Soccernomics but the reader will come out of it with a better understanding not just of football, but of how economists think and what they know.
Reviews with the most likes.
Soccernomics has given me some great insights about soccer I hadn't thought about. It makes you wonder about certain aspects of the sport you hadn't thought about.
It debunks a lot of clichés, by using clear and understandable data. The authors take a lot of factors on and of the pitch in consideration and have put a lot of work in making sure stats are as realitic as possible.
The book is far from perfect however. Certain points are given a way too long introduction written at very slow tempo. Quotes that are outdated and unimportant to the plot are often recycled and sometimes examples of statements are too long dwelled upon.
Another flaw about the book is that it is written as an alternative to the book Moneyball, but for soccer fans. The book tries to hard to imitate Moneyball, by constantly using it as a reference and referring to chapters and statements in it.
Not a bad book, but it's got a lot of problems. I'm not an economist (/econometrician) or anything, but I would be reading and see a flaw in the logic that, sure, it was probably fine to overlook, but it would make me wonder more and more what other flaws the book had, that I had missed. I took it all with a grain of salt: many of its analyses declare positively that such-and-such a country is the best, or worst, or biggest overachiever, but the methods getting there take small liberties at every step, which seems like it would produce cascading inaccuracies (remember the movie Multiplicity?).
The reason I kept reading, after a certain point, was that it offered me a lot of interesting historical information - about soccer, and sometimes just about the progress of smaller nations that you don't hear much about in American high school history classes.
So it's absolutely worth reading, but I wouldn't take it too seriously.
