What’s your favourite sports-related book?
An interesting article was posted recently on the Online Degree Programs blog. Entitled 100 Best Books for Serious Sports Fans, it groups the books by sports (baseball, basketball, American football, football [soccer for our US friends], tennis, golf) or genre (fiction, sports & society), and provides a short comment on each suggested book.
While the list is fairly heavily US-centric, some entries are more relevant to this blog’s main focus (a business/management perspective on sports, with a European focus), and are noteworthy. Among them, Soccernomics by the FT’s Simon Kuper, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, and The Elusive Fan by Irving Rein, Philip Kotler and Ben Shields.
Personally, I would have mentioned some more “technical” tomes in the list, e.g. one of the many more academic volumes covering the management of sports, or even sports-specific training manuals; I simply assume that a “serious sports fan” also practices their favourite discipline, and is inherently interested in seeking new ways to train and improve their performance in it, and as a result, likes to read about how to get better at it. But that’s obviously bound to be very personal ! (When I decided to get serious about inline speedskating a few years ago, I bought the only “bible” in this field, Speed on Skates by Barry Publow, and have since read and used it so much that it is almost falling apart !)
Which book is, in your opinion, a must-read for you fellow Sports Management Blog readers? Chime in in the comments below !
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I’d add in for soccer Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson, which deals with all you ever wanted to know and more about the evolution of tactics in soccer. or Morbo by Phil Ball, which deals with the history and nature of the Spanish game.
A great running book is Born To Run by Christopher McDougall which tells a great running story while intertwining academic studies on running’s hottest topics.
Great suggestions – thanks Ryan !
Have you ever read one of Murakami’s books (apparently, also pretty philosophical thoughts around running)? I got one (in French) for my birthday, can’t wait to start reading it…
Hey Gabriel — I haven’t read any of his books, I’ll have to give it a try, but after seeing the 100 books list I have a lot of books on the shelf I have to read, including a bunch of soccer books still left to go through.
I’m with U on that one, Ryan – I prefer not even to count the books that are craving for my attention on my “to-be-read” shelf!
A few on sports, a few on entrepreneurship, some more on social media, etc… I’ll have to think of writing a blog post just for that! 