Soccer Artifact of the week #1

I really liked this book by Gianluca Vialli, Italian soccer player who played for Sampdoria, Juventus and Chelsea (and of course, Italy). He was later manager of Chelsea. The book does two things better than virtually any other sports book I have read (and I have read a lot of sports books, especially those crappy Boy's Life-type autobiographies from the 60s and 70s). First, it conveys the mentality of a successful athlete in an unsentimental way. The book is not a my-life-as-a-footballer book, but you still see how, for Vialli, playing soccer was about winning, not about having fun. Second, it makes actual, supportable, generalizations about the difference in sporting culture from one country to the next -- in this case, Italy and England.