Yes, baseball season is in full swing, and the NBA playoffs are drawing to a close, but most eyes in the sporting world are now focused, of course, on one thing: “UFC Freedom 250,” a mixed-martial arts event that will take place on June 14—President Trump’s 80th birthday—on the South Lawn of the White House. Some other people—give or take a few billion viewers—will also be watching the World Cup, the quadrennial men’s soccer championship that is being held this year in Canada, Mexico, and a not-quite-yet-soccer-mad nation known as the United States.
Naturally, a lot has been written about the World Cup—and soccer in general—in recent months. Some of the best of it is in book form. Roger Bennett, the rabid football fan and founder of the Men in Blazers media company, has a book out titled We Are the World (Cup): A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Sporting Event (Dey Street/HarperCollins, March 3). Bennett is now an American citizen, but he hasn’t lost his droll English sense of humor. It shines throughout the book, as when he writes about the world’s greatest soccer player: “Standing a diminutive 5’7”, squat and thick-necked and illogically pale, sporting a scruffy beard that went only so far toward obscuring the softness of his jawline and a hairstyle that can only be described as Supercuts, Lionel Messi gave off normal guy blessed with the football skills of god.” Our critic wrote, “This book has much to offer die-hards and bandwagon-jumpers alike.”
Mexican writer Juan Villoro tackles the sport in a delightful essay collection translated by Francisco Cantú: The Game at the End of the World: Villainous Referees, Communist Bakers, the Secret Women’s World Cup, and a Goalkeeper’s Last Stand (Restless Books, May 5). Villoro, too, is witty, as this description of long-suffering Mexican fans shows: “Accustomed to adversity, we Mexicans consider the scoreline a suggestion we can ignore.” Our reviewer praised the book as an “entertaining, perceptive analysis of soccer in the Americas and beyond.”
Will Mexico’s neighbor to the north fare any better on the pitch? Soccer writer Leander Schaerlaeckens considers the question in The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts (Viking, May 12). Our review calls it “an authoritative, strenuously timely history of America’s efforts to compete with traditional soccer powerhouses.”
Further north, in Canada, journalist Chris Jones writes of how soccer—and a new passion for the English team of Burnley—helped him cope with personal hardship. Our critic summed up the memoir Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies (Random House, June 2) as “charming, but with plenty of rough edges, and a book every soccer/football fan might well take to heart.”
Soccer boasts many flashy personalities, and the ball itself has a colorful history, as is revealed in The Football: The Amazing Mathematics of the World’s Most Watched Object (Princeton Univ., 2025) by Étienne Ghys and translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. The slim book playfully examines the designs—and physics—of soccer balls over time. Our critic applauded it as “a kick for fans and nonfans alike.”
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
