Soccernomics

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 Quotes that are outdated and unimportant to the plot are often recycled and sometimes examples of statements are too long dwelled upon.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.

There's a lot of good information here, but it's mostly buried in dry, academic description of their statistical methodology. A good editor could improve this book immensely.

Fun book to read if you're interested in soccer. Even if you're skeptical about the way economics is used here, there are still plenty of trivia here for the soccer fan. Most fascinating is the analysis of penalty kicks as game theory during the Man U vs Chelsea Champions League final. Made me went back to closely watch it again on YouTube.

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.