Soccer Novels for World Cup Fever

The World Cup is about to begin and there are more excellent novels about soccer than you would think. In fact,  the World Cup is the perfect time to take advantage of one of my RA Basics: Promote the Books Patrons Would Not Find Without Your Help, because when we help readers find books they would never find without us, that is how we make ourselves indispensable in their lives.

The World Cup is the perfect event to prove this rule. Why? Well, first off, people who never watch soccer any other time of the year will get wrapped up in the World Cup. Putting out novels that feature the sport-- in a variety of genres-- will pique their interest. Also, with the event in North America and many cities without games still hosting watch satires in their MLS stadiums, we need to jump open the bandwagon somehow.

LitHub published a great piece today entitled, "Is This the Strangest Soccer Novel Ever Written?: TOBIAS CARROLL ON CARLOS LABBÉ'S THE MURMURATION."

From the introduction:

This piece was published in collaboration with Golden Goal, a literary magazine about the intersection of politics, culture and sport at the 2026 World Cup. To read more, visit their website: goldengoal.world. 

Over the years, writers from around the world have tried their hands at using soccer as a backdrop for memorable fiction. Tonally speaking, they cover a vast terrain, including J.L. Carr’s comic How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup and Leonard Gribble’s whodunit The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. Some will cut more deeply for soccer fans of a literary bent; others can be savored no matter what your feelings about the beautiful game might be. David Peace’s modernist Red or Dead, about the life of the legendary Liverpool coach Bill Shankly, left me frequently breathless despite having little emotional investment in the ups and downs of Liverpool.

If that novel—a work of precisely composed prose in which Peace uses repetition and the sheer bulk of its more than 800 pages to take the reader into Shankly’s inner life and the meticulous rhythms of his squad’s play—represents one pole of how to make a great soccer novel, standing opposite it is Carlos Labbé’s 2015 The Murmuration, translated into English by Will Vanderhyden. I feel comfortable declaring that The Murmuration is the strangest novel ever written about the game of soccer. The bulk of the novel uses a real event as its setting: the 1962 World Cup semi-final between Chile and Brazil. That part of it, at least, will be familiar to longtime soccer enthusiasts. Where things get a little weirder comes when Labbé introduces psychic powers into the mix.

Click here to read more about this awesome book. 

I see in my system, this book is on Hoopla only, so you might have to add a physical copy to your collections, but as I have said many times, you need to make your display in the building and online. This is a greta opportunity to build lists for people to access books via Hoopla and Libby as well as int he building. Please add QR codes to those digital lists to your physical displays.

Now here are trusted humans created lists of more soccer books for your World Cup displays:

• Goodreads lists tagged soccer (all genres and nonfiction included)
• Well-written books about soccer-- Reddit
• Fiction books about footballers (soccer)-- Reddit
• Books about football/soccer-- Reddit
• For the Love of the Game: Soccer Books--Chicago Public Library Staff Created List
• use your closest big city library's catalog to find more like this. 
• 23 Books All Soccer Fans Should Read -- BuzzFeed

There is overlap here, but also plenty of titles to fill out a small World Cup themed display. Also bonus points if you can get your library to allow you to make a display that uses the whole collection, media, and even allows books for all ages in one place near the front of your library. Here is a post where I help you have resources to argue for "Inter-Generational" displays.