LEGS HEARTS MINDS

Love conquers all. Or maybe it’s soccer.

Canadian sportswriter Jones is fresh back from an assignment, jetlagged, when he opens his wife’s laptop and finds that she’s been carrying on with one of his good friends. Thus commences an unpleasant slide down the razor blade of life: an ugly divorce, as well as the loss of wealth, home, and family. “I was forty-two years old,” he writes. “Nothing true of my life would be true again.” Suicidal depression followed and always an ungovernable rage—cooled a bit when a friendly, empathetic police officer explains that the legal system wasn’t against fathers as such but “against fathers who seemed capable of violence.” A few punch-ups follow, then a slow unwinding, and then a measure of self-redemption in the rediscovery of a family tradition, namely devotion to the northwestern English soccer (they call it football, of course) team of Burnley. That renewed fandom yields something more than just an opportunity to hoot at a well-placed goal: “Football is a game of dreams,” Jones writes. “It’s about who you want to be. It’s also a game of pragmatism. It demands that you know who you are.” In time, better things happen to him: His connections to his children and parents strengthen, his anger wanes, and he falls in love with a woman who, in a fine moment of understanding, takes him to a Burnley match in London, where he learns one thing about who he is: “I might pass for a football lunatic in Canada. In England, I was a tourist in a costume.” And something remarkable happens to Burnley, too: As if swayed by Jones’s devotion, the club comes to life, breaking numerous records and winning a championship in 2024–2025 on a road to recovery all their own.

Charming, but with plenty of rough edges, and a book every soccer/football fan might well take to heart.