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Greg's taking a little breather in Mokum and letting his phone cool down...by the way we're both in Amsterdam for the Nats game in March, so hope to see you all there - jetsetters among you could combine it with Eire v Brazil the night before at Arsenal; they're flogging this all over London right now so the tix can't be selling too well yet.

I spend a lot of my time reading soccer books and I still get excited about new ones; it's hard to believe but the world's greatest sport had next to no books written about it prior to the early 1990s, and nothing like baseball or cricket for instance. Thankfully, that has all changed now.

2009 was not as fertile a year as it could have been in football lit, but there were still some good reads. I tend to ignore player autobiographies, so I might have missed a gem, but probably not.

US soccer lit saw Grant Wahl's The Beckham Experiment provide a definitive account of MLS' latest jamboree, in the best traditions of fly-on-the-wall reportage. Warren St. John's Outcasts Unitedwas a well-worn tale of soccer's knack of uniting the world, this time in the shape of refugees in Atlanta, but was engrossing and moving nonetheless.

In Britain, the paperback edition of Jonathan Wilson's superb Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics was released, the most telling and personal take yet on the history of football tactics and a must for serious fans' shelves.

Soccernomics/Why England Lose (UK) by Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski stands out as the most interesting new release of last year.

Kuper has an awesome reputation as a soccer scribe, despite only two books to his name - Soccer Against the Enemy and Ajax, the Dutch, the War. But his day job is in financial journalism, which he applies with the help of a fellow economist to produce a wholly new take on the Beautiful Game, albeit in the vein of Freakonomics and with a hint of Michael Lewis' baseball classic, Moneyball thrown in.

No other book discusses why regional cities' clubs out-perform capital cities', why MLS' single-entity fails, why a blond Brazilian player after a World Cup is the worst value for money buy and why China will be the world champions one day.
Scatter-gun, over-reliant on statistics and at times smug Soccernomics may be, but you would be hard-pressed to find a book which makes you stop and re-think your footballing prejudices more than this does.

Ed Glinert's The London Football Companion had to be 2009's most rigorously researched football book, full of extraordinary minutiae from a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of London streets and stories. Still in England, Beastly Fury by Richard Sanders provided a colourful account of soccer's creation years amidst the Victorian epoch.

Lastly with an African World Cup imminent, it's worth taking a look at Ian Hawkey's Feet of the Chameleon, a collection of in-depth pieces on the game in the 'dark continent', which we in the west still know precious little about.

-Sean O'Conor