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 cliché 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 cliché ... 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."

Simon Kuper is one of the world's leading writers on soccer. His book Soccer Against the Enemy won the William Hill Prize for sports book of the year in Britain. He writes a weekly sports column in the Financial Times. He lives in Paris.Stefan Szymanski is professor of economics and MBA Dean at Cass Business School in London. Tim Harford has called him "one of the world's leading sports economists." Szymanski lives in London.