Internal Programming Note

So let's catch you up as to where I am on the soccer book. It's been playing a sizable part in the fact that posts have been shorter than normal lately, and it's likely to continue to be that way for the next month.

As of now, the book sits at 275,689 words. That's kind of a lot. It's longer than any of the Harry Potter books, for instance. (The longest Harry Potter book, Order of the Phoenix, came in at 257,045.) But then, the book that has since its publication been quickly considered to be the Bible of the sport, 'The Ball Is Round' by David Goldblatt, comes in at one hell of a lot more than that. (The exact word count is unavailable, probably because math ran out of numbers. Suffice to say it comes in at a gigantic 907 pages, not counting bibliography, acknowledgements and index.) The club count stands at 1,022.

I estimate I'll be ready to start trying to get this thing sold on May 25th. I'll be going to a game, Chicago Fire vs. FC Dallas, on May 23rd. The next two days, I've set aside for final spit-shining. By the end of that period- May 25th- I'm planning to call it. Over those three days, the blog will sit dormant.

In at least one sense, the end can't come a moment too soon. I'm hitting some serious roadblocks trying to find new teams to talk about at this point; it does the book no good to talk about boring clubs who are just going to sit there eating up pages without contributing anything. They can't all get in. It doesn't help that I've managed to exhaust most of the sources I've gone through over the course of writing the book.

Me: 'So tell me a little bit about Inter Milan.'
Source: 'Oh, absolutely. Yakyakyakyakyakyakyak.'
Me: 'Okay, now tell me a little bit about Alianza Lima.'
Source: '...er... okay, let me see what I've got on them... okay, I got something for you.'
Me: 'All right, now tell me a little bit about Goyang Kookmin Bank of South Korea.'
Source: '...you shot who in the what now?'
Me: 'All right, fine, what about Nikao Sokattack of the Cook Islands?'
Source: 'Okay, seriously, fuck you.'

So that's about where we sit right now. (The last club to actually get in was O'Higgins of Chile.) It is good in a way that I'm going this deep- I mean, we're at the point where if I don't cover these clubs, who will- but it's exhausting as hell.

Just to keep you posted.