Of all the organized sports out there, more kids in this country play soccer. You’d think that would translate into a fervor when that generation grows up, to where we could have deadly riots mixed in with our sporting events, too. But yet, they just grow up to love the NFL. I’ve never understood that.
Neither has Dave Eggers, and that’s part of the point of his essay – but one of 32 – in the collection THE THINKING FAN’S GUIDE TO THE WORLD CUP, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (of the acclaimed memoir OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL). The hype dubs this thick, handy tome as “McSweeney’s meets Sports Illustrated,” and who am I to argue? That sums it up perfectly.
So does Eggers’ – treading less pretentious waters than usual – description of a child’s soccer game: “It requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, twenty-two kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match.” Yep, that’s the ticket. And I’ve got homemade video to prove it.
But this GUIDE is not about kiddie leagues; it’s about the big boys and the soccer – er, excuse me, football – square-off of them all: the World Cup. If you’re unfamiliar with the history of the event, this one has all the stats you’ll ever need. But the real kick lies in the all-new essays, each by a different writer, each focusing on a different participating country. The aforementioned Eggers covered the U.S., HIGH FIDELITY‘s Nick Hornby sounds off on his love-hate relationship with the UK team and FAST FOOD NATION author Eric Schlosser visits a Swedish prison league. Those are the biggest names; the rest work for publications as varied as Time, Granta and Der Spiegel, and touch on subjects like sex, grafitti and Pelé. One, John Lancester, utilizes a chart to plot the “four-way oscillation between beauty, ugliness, success and failure” of past Brazilian teams.
For someone like me who doesn’t follow the sport – let alone sports plural – the book works best as a thumb-througher. Be charmed by the cover’s clip art, then flip ‘er open and see if you can find something to your liking. There was a lot that bored me – you can only read so many tales of “when I was X years old, I remember such and such game” before getting tired. But its lighthearted approach to a sport so many (too many) take far too seriously is appreciated, and they’re the ones who’ll eat this up on their way to getting trampled in stadiums this summer and murdering goalies who let the ball get past them. –Rod Lott
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