Soccer Book Update

Previously here, I've mentioned that I am also, outside this blog, working on creating a book on club soccer. To remind you, the idea of the book is to be a primer on selecting a club for adoption, assuming that the reader has no team to start out with. And there are still plenty of those people in the States. To that end, I'm trying to give little starter profiles on as many clubs as possible, to try and show what kind of culture and environment a fan can expect with each club.

That's the key there. I'm focusing less on how much a team has won than on who the team actually is. 'The New York Yankees have 27 World Series titles, won in these years' isn't what I'm looking for. 'The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox hate each other with a passion, were the longtime home of Babe Ruth (which is a large factor in said hatred as then-Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees to finance a Broadway play), and once had Monument Park- featuring plaques of all the players whose numbers the Yankees have retired- in the field of play; they're the biggest love-them-or-hate-them club in the league and you need to know that before you adopt them' is what I'm looking for.

And because there's more to soccer than just the U.S., England, Spain, Italy and Germany, I've made an effort to include- or in cases where info is sorely lacking, at least mention- at least one club from every FIFA entity, as well as some selected other locations. Recently, I managed to hit that little milestone. As of this writing, the book's draft contains 767 featured clubs from 218 different national entities, along with national profiles for each entity. (Most recent team added: Celta Vigo of Spain. On deck: FC Basel of Switzerland, who really should have made it in a lot sooner, but seeing as I'm picking teams from an on-deck circle mostly via RNG, their number just didn't come up for a long time.)

Now, I don't consider the thing done- I'll consider it done when I stop finding teams with good stories to tell, and so far there's no sign of that happening- but I am at the point where I'm getting told it'd be a good idea to start putting out feelers. So while I'm certainly not going to be neglecting you guys or anything, what may happen is I might be relying a little more on shorter posts for a little while to get me through the day so I can devote more time to the book and, fingers crossed, finding it a good home.

And, of course, should anyone out there actually have a contact I could borrow, or better yet be one, that'd be awesome.