Soccer is cheap. You just need a ball of some sort and you can make up the rest from there. The ball can literally be made of trash or cost a hundred dollars. The game remains the same: the world’s most popular pastime.
Finding the Game: Three Years, Twenty-five Countries, and the Search for Pickup Soccer by Gwendolyn Oxenham is about a global journey of four people determined to record soccer at its simplest form.
Oxenham and her companions found pickup soccer in some world’s most exotic locales: Tehran, the Amazon, the rooftops of Tokyo, and the slums of Brazil to name a few. They met many characters along the way. This is not surprising as the people are the story, whether they were prisoners or students or something in between.
The most unforgettable character for us was Ronaldinha, a young Brazilian girl with the same flair and passion of the man her name resembles. Could she the next Marta? A role player on the Brazilian national team? Or just another talented player that can’t shake her roots?
The book is all about dreams. The dreams of players worldwide, people that play for fun, people that want to be pros, or people just trying to make a statement about their lives.
Finding the Game unfolds with the feel of a great storyteller: very conversational, natural, and free-flowing. It has to be on your list of must-reads. It allows you to take your own personal journey to see soccer at its core, away from the glitz and glamour of the modern game.
