If you look at an older version of this book, which is what I read, you will see this on the cover: "Why England Loses, why Spain, Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, and even Iraq are destined to become the kings of the world's most popular sport." A more recent edition had this: "Why England Loses, why Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and even Iraq are destined to become the kings of the world's most popular sport."
Notice the changes? That's because this book is full of shit. It cherry picks its data (and there's precious little of that) to support the predetermined theses of the authors. Once in a while there's a rare nugget, but most of the good advice in this book is nothing more than commonsense, and most of the 'data' is nothing more than a few choice anecdotes which prove nothing. I don't think anyone with common sense would try to argue that statistics cannot be of value to the soccer world, but the authors really don't make that case here.
The big problem is that the book is regularly self-contradictory, negating in a later chapter what it only just got through asserting as a 'solid fact' in an earlier one. In short, it's a mess. It's way too long and rambling. It could be literally half as long and make the same points, but it would still be wrong. The volume I read was last updated in 2014, and here we are, and the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and even Iraq are not kings of the sport or anywhere near. I was just reading a coupel of days ago that United States will miss its third straight Olympic men’s soccer tournament. And Brazil hasn't done so much winning lately, either! Not that the book really makes an effort to explain why they're supposed to - and not that it really talks much about south American football.
One thing they really didn't cover in terms of international football, is something they mentioned briefly in team sports which is that picking the best players doesn't necessarily mean you have the best team. The players have to work well together, so it's not enough to buy the best forwards, midfielders and defenders, you have to buy the best who can integrate into a team to really get the results you want. I don't think they pursued that anywhere near as strenuously as they ought to have. Instead they seemed to be focusing on everything else, some of which was nonsense.
The book's main thrust is almost entirely on Europe which is quite plainly wrong. Europe has a strong football tradition, but it's far from the only region of the world which has such a tradition these days, and the book says literally nothing about women's football, like it doesn't exist, which begs the question: why the sexism? And why are women's international games producing significantly different results than the men's games? That's certainly a question worth exploring but it's not even touched on here. I can't commend this because it's very poorly done and does nothing to offer original or penetrating answers to the questions it poses.
