Soccernomics: Why England Lose, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey and Even India are Destined to Become the New Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport - Softcover

LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2009 Daily Telegraph "If you're a football fan, I'll save you some time: read this book ... compulsive reading ... thoroughly convincing." Observer "Szymanksi has recently published the best introduction to sports economics ... while Kuper is probably the smartest of the new generation of super-smart sportswriters ... fascinating stories." Metro "[Kuper and Szymanski] basically trash every cliche about football you ever held to be true. It's bravura stuff ... the study of managers buying players and building a club is one you'll feel like photocopying and sending to your team's chairman" Paddy Harverson, former communications director of Manchester United, Financial Times "Demolishes ... many soccer shibboleths ... well argued, too. Szymanski, an economist, knows his stuff, and Kuper, a born contrarian and FT sports writer, is incapable of cliche ... great stories and previously unknown nuggets." Sport Magazine "One for the thinkers" LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2009 "Daily Telegraph" "If you're a football fan, I'll save you some time: read this book ... compulsive reading ... thoroughly convincing." "Observer" "Szymanksi has recently published the best introduction to sports economics ... while Kuper is probably the smartest of the new generation of super-smart sportswriters ... fascinating stories." "Metro" "[Kuper and Szymanski] basically trash every cliche about football you ever held to be true. It's bravura stuff ... the study of managers buying players and building a club is one you'll feel like photocopying and sending to your team's chairman" Paddy Harverson, former communications director of Manchester United, "Financial Times" "Demolishes ... many soccer shibboleths ... well argued, too. Szymanski, an economist, knows his stuff, and Kuper, a born contrarian and FT sports writer, is incapable of cliche ... great stories and previously unknown nuggets." "Sport Magazine" "One for the thinkers" "The Times" "More thoughtful than most of its rivals and, by football standards, postively intellectual ... Kuper, a brilliantly contrary columnist, and Szymanski, an economics professor ... find plenty of fertile territory in their commendable determination to overturn the lazy preconceptions rife in football." "Prospect" "Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski are a highly effective and scrupulously rational team, combining the former's detailed and nuanced understanding of European football with the latter's sophisticated econometric analysis. With a remarkable lightness of touch, they desmonstrate the limits of conventional thinking in football, as well as the real patterns of behaviour that shape sporting outcomes."

Why do England lose? Why does Scotland suck? Why doesnt America dominate the sport internationally...and why do the Germans play with such an efficient but robotic style? These are questions every soccer aficionado has asked. Soccernomics answers them. Using insights and analogies from economics, statistics, psychology, and business to cast a new and entertaining light on how the game works, Soccernomics reveals the often surprisingly counterintuitive truths about soccer. An essential guide for the 2010 World Cup, Soccernomics is a new way of looking at the worlds most popular game.