5. Soccernomics

By Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski (306 pp)

This book came out in 2009 and it uses statistics to talk about soccer. Most of it is super interesting but since the point of the the book is use of statistics, they sometimes talk so much about statistics my face melted. It's easy to skim over those parts. I wish I'd taken better notes as I went along so I could point out some of my favorite bits. They talk about soccer all over the world. They talk about the business side of soccer but also the game like penalty kick data. They talk about the US and soccer v. the NFL. They talk about why so many of the world's top players grew up in extreme poverty. I guess a better way of phrasing it would be to explain why such poor kids were able to grow up into great soccer players. Because they had nothing else to do so by the time they were teenagers they'd already logged in the hours and hours of practice to develop their skills. Recommended for soccer nerds.