Authors: Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski
Genre: Popular Economics
Pages (words): 336 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Kuper, a sport journalist, and Szymanski, a sports economist, use cold, hard data to tackle questions regarding commonly-held beliefs about soccer. Ranging from what determines a country's success in major tournaments to how purchase a player for your team to the game theory behind the penalty kick, they show that many of the "truisms" of soccer are actually wrong. They have the data to prove it.
Thoughts: I'm kind of hit-and-miss on the extent to which I like popular economics books like Freakonomics. But you couldn't find a book better suited to my particular tastes than Soccernomics. I follow U.S. soccer relatively closely, and I think to myself very often that I would love to have the data to test a few ideas. In this book, Kuper and Szymanski do that for me. I really loved the book, and I even thought that the economics they used were sound for the most part. That being said, this book really isn't for everyone. In fact, if you're not a relatively big soccer fan, you probably wouldn't enjoy it. But I loved it!
Disclaimer: None.
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