Miracle of Castel di Sangro - Joe McGinniss Reviews

This is a football book but its also a sociological study of football and the Italian psyche, it is written by an American giving it a different stance to many other football books and digs beneath the surface of tactics and games to cover an extraordinary season in the life of the small football club Castel di Sangro. Whats it ...

Books about football are not a rarity. Good ones tend to be - there exist a lot of lazy efforts that seek to capitalise on the inherent drama and saga-like nature of the game and the politics that surround it without adding an awful lot of originality or perceptiveness in return. Amongst the wide range of writing on the subject, however, The ...

The first thing to say is that ‘The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro’ is not a book about football. It is a book about how the people of a small town rediscover their sense of community when they become united behind the success of their football team. The football is merely a backdrop for the events that unfold and it is merely a device to contrast ...

‘The Miracle of Castle di Sangro’ is basically a diary of a football mad America, who becomes obsessed with ‘soccer’ during the world cup that was held in the US in 1994. After being enthralled by the Italian team, in particular Roberto Baggio, he goes off to Italy to watch ‘a miracle’ as a small local town side ...

Having read a review of this book in the football magazine 'When Saturday Comes', I thought I knew what I was in for: American author, famous for political comment, gets bitten by the football bug during World Cup 94 in the USA and then decides to travel out to a small town in southern Italy to sample the atmosphere and the magic of a ...