After a relaxing Spring Break, I'm finally back in the country and, naturally, back to blogging. Vacations are usually a great chance for me to catch up on my reading for pleasure, and this one was no different; I spent a good chunk of my travel and beach time this week working through Joe McGinniss's The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro, a non-fiction book about a small-town Italian soccer club trying to maintain its status in the Italian soccer league's Serie B. While the book is a bit long and overly dramatic in spots, I really enjoyed most of it. The tale of the Castel Di Sangro team is a pretty impressive and unbelievable underdog story (you can read more about it here), but what I really got out of the book was how important local soccer clubs are to life in rural Italy.
The author spent a year traveling around Italy with the Castel Di Sangro club; 38 weeks of matches, training sessions and team bonding. Because the town of Castel Di Sangro has only 5,000 residents, the players and the townspeople were all extremely close. The players and coach ate all of their meals together at the same restaurant everyday, and spent most of their time together socially, too. While we are used to star athletes distancing themselves from public view, the Castel Di Sangro players understood how much they meant to the local community and embraced their roles as local heroes. In a season full of tragedy (two players died in a car accident midway through the 1996-97 season covered by the book, and later in the year another was arrested and accused of trafficking cocaine from Chile to Italy), the club pulled together emotionally and physically and (spoiler alert!) finished in 16th place out of of 20, avoiding relegation back to Serie C (from which they had come the previous season).
The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro is worth the read, if you've got the time to work through it.
The book's coverage of the drama and suspense that surround European soccer, because of the sport's relegation structure, is perhaps the best part of the book. Unlike in U.S. sports, underachieving European teams face the prospect of being relegated to a lower league if they finish at the bottom of the standings, to be replaced by the top teams from a lower division. I've always been a big fan of the relegation concept (and pushed for it in Big East basketball in a post a few months ago), and the book helps show why. While Castel Di Sangro knew from day one that they had no chance of winning a Serie B championship, they set a realistic goal of avoiding relegation back to Serie C and thus had something to play for throughout the season. The pride of the players and the town, not to mention tons of money for the team's owners, was at stake each week, making every game critical for even bottom-dwelling teams. Reading the book will definitely make you wish we had relegation in baseball when the Pirates and Diamondbacks are playing meaningless games this September . . .
The book's not perfect - as I mentioned, it's too long and the author thinks a bit too much of himself in spots (he repeatedly criticizes the coach for not listening to his lineup suggestions, despite the fact that the coach has over 40 years of soccer experience to the author's six months). That being said, it's a great insider's view of soccer in Europe, a sport surrounded by such passion and emotion that it's hard for American sports fans to fully understand. McGinniss's work brings the reader a bit closer to comprehending the madness that surrounds even the smallest of European soccer clubs, and for that reason alone is probably worth the read.
1 comment:
McGinnis is an arrogant ass. That's how he makes his living.
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