Talk about counterintuitive.
The bestselling soccer title and fourth most-popular sports title in the U.S. at the moment is Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, a journalist and economist, respectively, and is published by Nation Books, the Nation's co-publishing venture with Perseus.
Originally published in the U.K. as Why England Lose: And Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained, the book was named a Financial Times best book of the year and made a respectable showing. Nation Books, not usually considered a sports publisher, took the title because it had published an earlier, more political book about soccer by Kuper called Soccer Against the Enemy.
Published here last October, Soccernomics appeared with a new title and a new subtitle: the weighty "Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport." Perhaps Perseus Books Group president David Steinberger put it better, saying the book takes "a counterintuitive analytic approach to soccer.
"It didn't get any reviews," Steinberger continued, but bloggers about soccer, sports and Freakonomics talked up Soccernomics. This led to a steady increase in sales, especially in the run-up to the World Cup in South Africa. Borders, too, was a strong supporter from the beginning, and that bookseller's track record helped show other retailers the book's potential.
In the spring, the company did a minor "re-promotion," changing the cover slightly and adding a cross-sport quotation from Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's ("Kuper and Szymanski... bring valuable, objective analysis to soccer"), and some other blurbs. Soccernomics is now in its fourth printing and has a total of
80,000 copies in print.