A review by mattycakesbooks
Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power by Simon Kuper

2.0

First of all, don't read this. It just isn't worth your time. And I'm not saying that because I hated it or that I hate the author - Simon Kuper's book Soccernomics is excellent - but because it just doesn't deliver what it promises. I was going to give this one star until I made it to the final chapter, which was written probably about a decade after the rest of the book. It's the only one that doesn't fixate on Kuper's own irrelevant travels and interviews, and rather deals with the subject at hand.

The epilogue helped me change my mind as well - in it, Kuper reveals he was about 22 or 23 at the time of writing this book, and my thought when I found this out was, "oh, that's not that bad for a 22 year old." But the book seems more interested in anecdotes than in trends, which is what separates it from a book like Soccernomics. And often, the anecdotes are totally irrelevant to the point he's trying to prove.

Ultimately, I finished the book wishing it had been written by Grantland's Brian Phillips, Dave Zirin, or a 40-year-old Simon Kuper instead.