89 Books Like The Ugly Game

Zimbalist has a masterful way of story-telling, and Circus Maximus is his best book to date. Yes, his 2015 book exposes two of the most powerful authorities governing international sports, the IOC and FIFA, but it is such a wonderful read. I found this book full of data and facts that build compelling arguments and challenged my conventional wisdom about the leaders and organizations involved in producing the Olympics and World Cup.

I began viewing the IOC and FIFA from a different lens after reading this thorough and insightful book about the economic realities, politics, and dark side of hosting mega sporting events. Not much has changed from the 2010s to the modern day.

This book provides one of the best factual examinations of arguably the most powerful sports organization in the world, along with its extensive network involved in staging the Olympic Games. Published during the year the Olympics were held in communist China, it provides fascinating insights into the actors connected to the Olympic Movement and how money, power, and politics often are the key factors driving decisions.

I was especially attracted to the plethora of graphs and figures providing concise, informative snapshots of critical and often elusive information such as TOP sponsor fees paid, employee lists for international federations, television redistribution entities, and voting rights of the World Anti-doping Agency.

There aren’t many sources that can provide as much proprietary information, especially with respect to the financial and governance domains of the IOC and its broader ecosystem. This book is the one I reach for most often when needing to find… show more.

This book reads like a fictional suspense novel, but it’s not! It was engaging from the beginning where the opening lines seemed like the author was staging a murder mystery in a small town. However, the familiar characters from sports agents to owners to players in the 1980s quickly piqued my interest, and soon it was apparent that the story was about the mafia’s unsuccessful attempt to infiltrate the NFL in the eighties through money laundering, racketeering, bribery, wire fraud, and more.

I was intrigued by the political gamesmanship of the NFL, which was determined to eradicate the mafia’s takeover attempt, but was almost equally caught off guard by the previously untold story of its vulnerability to corruption, especially from an almost equally powerful organized crime affiliate.

The story-telling was especially compelling and read like a legal drama. Conspiracy was at its finest, and this book was exceptional for its… show more.

This is an awesome book diving into financial valuations, operating expenses, and business data for professional sports leagues through 1991. I loved the abundance of graphs profiling historical attendance figures, league revenues, player salaries, expansion, and other data points. I also appreciated the quality of business acumen and rhetoric about free agency, collective bargaining, tax sheltering, anti-trust violations, and other areas.

The book's historical nature was comprehensive and a reminder of the powerful landscape of professional sports and their cantankerous owners, who played a role in driving economic value through the decades before the mid-1990s. This concept prevails in the modern day. 

I adored this book. After I turned the final page, I sat in silence, sinking into all the feels. Set in Argentina, Furia is the story of Camila, a fierce soccer—or fútbol—player who is one of the best in her sport. However, she’s forced to keep her love of fútbol a secret because she’s living under the strict supervision of her father, who doesn’t believe girls should play sports. That story alone would be enough to make Furia one of my all-time favorite books, but it’s also got an incredible swoony love story. You don’t want to miss this one. 

I love this empowering story about Jaz, a sensitive, caring Black British girl who sets up a girls’ football team to prove to her mum that she is a star so that her mum will return home. As a reader, I found myself rooting for Jaz as she got into trouble (unfairly) and faced challenge after challenge. Priscilla, the writer, deals sensitively with issues of anxiety, fear, and rejection. Though girls football features heavily in the book, you don’t have to be into football to enjoy the book—I know next to nothing about it. A heart-warming and uplifting read.

David Conn’s book was first released in 1997, just a few years after the inception of the English Premier League.

It was the first critical evaluation of the new business of football, in which he sought to understand what was being lost as the game was transformed into a branch of the entertainment industry, while at the same time accepting the many unarguable benefits that were accompanying that transformation.

Its quality and importance are evidenced by the fact that it has been republished at least five times.

It remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the opaque world of football finance, governance, and ownership.

It’s tricky to recommend one book that just covers one footballing culture, but when a book is this good, it’s hard to leave out. The justification is that the Dutch have had an enormous influence on modern soccer, and it is their ideas of soccer and manipulation of space that are present in all of today’s top teams.

I bought this book as a 17-year-old, and it was a defining moment in my youth. I read it every five years or so. It is so thought-provoking and illuminating.  I learned about art, politics, land reclamation, and, of course, the master Johan Cruyff.

I spent many years of my youth flicking through history books on the World Cup and learning about legends like Beckenbauer and Cruyff, Pele, and Maradona, and have always been obsessed with the greatest event in sport. This book tells the definitive story of every event from Uruguay in 1930 up to Russia in 2018. 

Glanville’s style brings out the unique nature of every tournament and the teams, players, and coaches within them, making it much more than a series of brief match reports, which can be a challenge in chronological histories.

At 1,012 pages, this is certainly not for the faint-hearted, but it remains the most amazing football book I’ve ever read. It is unrivaled in its scope, with chapters focusing on every continent, even those for which soccer may not have fully won the public over (like the USA). 

Much more than a chronicle of who scored where and when, it is also a book about politics and society and the wider forces that shape football. The Ball is Round can be dipped into with the chapters you find more interesting, but I find it more rewarding to tackle from start to finish. It will take some time, but the joy is in the journey, not the destination.

A footballing reading rite of passage, our version of The Power Broker.