An absorbing cautionary tale for soccer fans and students of sports finance alike.
Two Wall Street Journal sportswriters chronicle a soccer rivalry that hinges on money as much as on-the-pitch performance.
Facing off in the Spanish soccer league for years, Lionel Messi (b. 1987), a native of Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo (b. 1985), from the Portuguese island of Madeira, were a study in contrasts: the former small and, as often noted here, lacking in much of a personality, the other voluble and larger than life. Yet both have always displayed nearly superhuman skills, and both emerged as superstars, sometimes to the unhappiness of teammates—in the case of Ronaldo, for example, never passing the ball to them because, he said, “I’d only see the ball.” Both were signed young to rising clubs from Barcelona and Madrid that would soon become the richest in the world—at least, write Robinson and Clegg, until Emirati investors pumped Manchester City and other British teams full of money. Part of the cash flow came from rival sportswear manufacturers Adidas and Nike, part from TV, part from gate revenues. With a huge publicity machine behind them, the rival players “accessed a level of recognition normally reserved for US presidents and popes.” Messi has more social media followers than LeBron James, Ronaldo more than Kim Kardashian. So popular as both athletes and “lifestyle brands” were the two that their clubs had to pay exorbitant amounts to keep them. Fans may argue over which player is better, but for the amount they paid Messi, the authors note, “Barça [Barcelona] could have bought six F-35 fighter jets from the US Air Force,” and Ronaldo commanded similarly huge numbers of euros. Messi and Ronaldo have gone on to other teams, but, the authors conclude, thanks to overreach, the clubs they once played for were left “out of ideas, running out of money, and increasingly desperate.”
An absorbing cautionary tale for soccer fans and students of sports finance alike.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-15717-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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