Summer Reading: The Miracle of Castel di Sangro

One of the great writers of the late 20th Century wrote an illuminating book about Italian football

Joe McGinnis was one of the great non-fiction and true crime (fiction) writers of the late 20th Century. His book The Selling of the President, 1968, (published in 1969) was among my early educations into the seedy and corrupt world of political campaigns. I read it while an undergraduate studying political science at the University of Florida in the mid 1990’s. That book along with Hedrick Smith’s The Power Game, became my bibles for how the idealism of public service had given way to the dark world of backroom and business-driven American politics. McGinnis in the 1970’s became a famous writer of true crime novels.

So it was quite a surprise later that decade when in 2000, I discovered a new book about soccer/football from McGinnis. It’s narrative, sweeping and riveting was one of my pivotal moments in going from championing the closed-structure of Major League Soccer (which I served as an evangelical preacher promoting from 1996 to the early 2000’s) to embracing open systems, community football and the idea of opportunity in the sport. The book is The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy

It is a book about a full season in a small remote Italian village and understanding what promotion meant to the community in terms of pride, psychology and economics as well as the crazy pressures on promoted teams.

The narrative is the type that few authors can deliver in any area and we’re lucky McGinnis, who rarely wrote about sport picked this subject to focus on.

It is well worth checking out.