Books on Football » Book Reviews » The Pitch
The Pitch
The Pitch: Business Lessons Learned on the Soccer Field
Linda J. Lord
iUniverse
ISBN: 9781440174537
131 pp, paperback
Reviewed by Sean O'Conor
Football is a passion for millions worldwide, and as the game spreads beyond the experience of the stadium fan, new perspectives are opened up.
Linda Lord is Canadian and a businesswoman, ticking two boxes not usually associated with football, though Owen Hargreaves and Karren Brady might disagree. But she comes from the ranks of that peculiarly North American subculture of the world's game - the soccer mom.
A concept still hard to understand in Europe, the soccer mom (or dad) spends hours ferrying around their offspring by car to 'soccer practice', matches and tournaments, to the extent that attending to football becomes a defining feature of their life, and they exist in such numbers that the name has become a staple of North American sociopolitical discussion.
Lord's book 'The Pitch' is a business manual inspired by her hours on the touchline, with an unusual and interesting approach. Instead of an the usual bullet-point list of lessons we expect from business books, this takes a biographical form as she recounts her travails running a small business and being a single parent to a football-playing boy. Consumed by her business and seeing soccer as a chore, she begins to think about what her boy is learning on the field and how it relates to her life.
Only at the end of the book does Lord revert to type and list a summary of lessons gleaned from watching the round-ball game. I was not sure the list of lessons was what I mostly draw from football, but then I do not think like a business person. Passionately supporting the fortunes of clubs and players as they rise and fall year after year has given me many a life lesson and an emotional experience, but the fan interpretation is not that of the spectator or touchline parent. Nevertheless, hard work, confidence, belief and motivation are words you hear players always spouting, so it is clear to see there are skills and attributes easily transferable to other fields.
But football is such a worldwide passion it can mean different things to different people and while making money and football are cultural anathemas to the terraces generation of fans, for others the two can be natural bedfellows. Fans will find the style refreshing, although will be unlikely to reach for the book in the first place: This is aimed at the entrepreneur with a passing interest in the sport, perhaps via their children.
What sport can teach us about life is a big topic however that has rarely been dealt with outside the USA. The perfect plainness of the game's format permits a myriad of readings and interpretations into what goes on beyond the white line and if football consumes a large chunk of our life then it had better be worthwhile.
Or, as an advert for boots proclaimed a few years ago, "Soccer is Life". Expect many more books mining this seam, but Linda Lord is thus far unique in being a soccer mom to break out of the stereotypes, realise the game works profoundly on many levels, and to write a book about it.
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