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Leading publisher Landucci SA de CV on Tuesday said it has bought the publishing rights for a guide book on the 2011 Cricket World Cup to be held in the Indian sub-continent.

"Landucci Publishing has bought the publishing rights for The Official ICC World Cup Guide Book' and will be releasing this exclusive 242 pager early January 2011," a company release said on Tuesday.

"The broad overview of content will be of host countries and cities, history of the world cups, legends in cricket, team statistics, special section on each team, profile on participating countries etc," it added.

Speaking about this unique idea Marco Landucci, Director said, "Landucci has been the Official Licensee of FIFA for the past 12 years. From our success at the FIFA World Cup, we felt there was a great opportunity to bring out a similar guide book for the ICC at the Cricket World Cup. Everyone wants a piece of the World Cup and we hope to give it to them through this official book."

Apart from being available in mass market format, the guide will also be available in a custom made format, the release said.

The book will hit the stands 50 days before the inaugural event of the ICC World Cup 2011.

Call it Money ball for soccer: journalist Kuper (Soccer against the Enemy, 2006) and economist Szymanski (Fans of the World, Unite! 2008) apply cold, hard facts to our commonly held beliefs about the beautiful game and tell us that everything we think we know is wrong. England’s national team doesn’t underachieve (if anything, given its size, location, and talent pool, it overachieves); paying big money for hot players isn’t a good idea (usually, the players’ exertions mean they’ll underperform next year); and soccer clubs make terrible (though remarkably durable) businesses. Unlike Kuper’s more sober Soccer against the Enemy, there’s a teasing playfulness, almost braggadocio, here, as the authors burst bubble after bubble using the words, “We have the data to answer this question.” As they acknowledge, some fans will resist subjecting long-held emotional attachments to the cold light of statistical analysis. And some may argue their findings: just as Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s are coming off their third losing season, author-praised AC Milan is off to a terrible start. But whether analyzing the relationship of spending to winning or applying game theory to the penalty kick, the authors’ delight in discovery proves both persuasive and contagious. It’s a fascinating book with the potential to effect genuine change in the sport. --Keir Graff

Related: Economic Impact of World Cup

Olé, olé, olé, olé.... The FIFA World Cup 2010 runs June 11 to July 11 in South Africa, and all this month, the Book Club is getting into the spirit of this huge sporting event — 32 countries, 31 days and a celebration of soccer that pulls in an audience of billions — with an in-depth look at the world's most popular game by one of Canada's finest journalists, John Doyle.

"Television has had a profound effect on international soccer tournaments, creating a vast global culture of celebration, joy, bittersweet feelings and, sometimes, despair. When the World Cup unfolds now, the planet is truly a global village."

In The World is a Ball: The Joy, Madness and Meaning of Soccer (Doubleday Canada), author and award-winning Globe and Mail television columnist John Doyle offers a richly detailed social history of "the beautiful game" and a thoughtful appraisal of its global impact in the 21st century.

Starting with an account of his boyhood love of the sport, growing up in Ireland in the 1960s, Doyle goes on to chronicle his travels to the major international tournaments and qualifying matches of the last decade with humour and insight. The World is a Ball covers everything from the action on the field of play to the colourful antics of diehard fans in the stands and the streets, and as a special bonus, includes a primer on the teams competing in World Cup 2010.

In his entertaining and informative new book, John Doyle shows that soccer is more than a game: it's a field of dreams that can buoy the pride of an underdog nation and an arena where fans of teams from opposing countries unite in a display of remarkable camaraderie.

Author Biography: At the age of 10, John Doyle won a gold medal for his debating skills in the Gaelic language, in his native Ireland. Years later, his gift for persuasion and for argument have made him into one of Canada's most popular and provocative columnists, as the Globe and Mail's television critic.

Doyle came to Canada in 1980 for Ph.D. studies in English literature at York University in Toronto. Eventually he abandoned his academic pursuits for freelance writing and after working briefly in radio and in television, he began writing for the Globe in 1990. He became its television columnist in 2000.

As a commentator on television and popular culture, Doyle has been widely published in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Ireland and has appeared on numerous TV and radio programs. His first book, the critically acclaimed memoir, A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age (Doubleday Canada), was named to the cbc.ca's list of the top 25 books of 2005 and has been published in five countries.

Doyle's writing on soccer has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the New York Times and the Guardian online. Since 2002, he has covered the major tournaments (the World Cup and the Euro Cup) and has travelled the world to witness key qualifying games for World Cup 2010.

He describes his recently published second book, The World is a Ball: The Joy, Madness and Meaning of Soccer, as "a love story, with laughter and tears. It's about chasing this thing you love all over the world to be with it, to experience it and be delighted by it."

John Doyle lives in Toronto, not far from BMO Field, home to the city's professional soccer team, Toronto F.C.

Highlights from The World is a Ball: "...the World Cup and the continental national championships in Europe and South America have become events that transcend athletic competition. These tournaments are festivals, carnivals of revelry, pageantry and celebration..."

Some of the best moments from World Cup 2002, on and off the pitch

Excerpt: From the Introduction, "Meaning All the Rambling Boys of Pleasure":

"One night in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup, an elderly Brazilian journalist sat beside me on a bench as we both waited for a bus. Eventually we talked, which surprised me because the journalists from Brazil rarely interact with others. Brazil has the most important soccer culture on the planet so, you know, they don't need to pay the slightest bit of attention to anyone else. It's their thing. The journalist was bored, perhaps, and maybe he wanted to show that he was cosmopolitan and his English was solid enough to hold a good conversation. Also, I think he was amused to meet a journalist from Canada covering the World Cup. We talked of this and that. Of Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. Meandering, he told me that, in Brazil, the young players are sometimes told that the ball is symbolic. It represents Mother Earth, and when players stroke, caress and kick it, they are like gods, tossing the earth around. "They must respect it," he said. "It is the planet we live on." This was delivered to me as a profound truth, and one known mainly to Brazilians."

Read the first 17 pages of The World is a Ball...

Quotes:

Praise for The World is a Ball

"With grace, insight, and a very different view from any other sports journalist, Doyle lays out the political, cultural and very human importance of soccer. He takes us on an entertaining and hilarious journey from his Irish childhood to Canada's unsuccessful qualifying games leading up to the 2010 World Cup on a circuitous and highly rewarding path." — Bolen Books, Victoria

Praise for John Doyle's A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age:

"A marvelous read, with keen insights and laugh-out-loud moments..." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Of course A Great Feast of Light is about considerably more than how a shy, naive, youngster with sticking-out ears saw the social and political sea changes of the '60s through the cool, blue crackle of the cathode-ray tube. Readers are treated to innocent but stinging impressions of the secular violence in the north, of the rude social hierarchy and of the subversive pop-culture tremors emanating from Britain which was so near and yet so far." — Canadian Press

"From the beguiling smile of the little imp on the cover to the very last page, this book is a delight.... [it is] beautifully written, both humorous and sad." — Montreal Gazette

"Brisk [and] witty...[A] delightful and original ramble; laconic, rueful and richly evocative of a time and place long gone and hardly lamented. [This] coming-of-age memoir, an intelligent and affable look at the vagaries of an earlier Ireland, is a book certain to win a wide and enthusiastic readership." — London Free Press

"[A] terrific book. Compelling, vivid and original." — Linden MacIntyre

Nation Books, New York, 2009, 336 pp., $14.95 (paper).

Are you getting ready for the soccer World Cup in South Africa this summer? Did you know that a nation’s income, population, and soccer experience are the main determinants of a team’s survival of the first round of the World Cup? Don’t rush off and check where your favorite national team stands. These three factors explain only 25 percent of the variation in goal differences; the remaining 75 percent is unexplained random noise or sheer luck—all courtesy of the power of econometrics.

This and many other surprising facts about the world of soccer are discussed in Soccernomics, by Financial Times writer Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, a leading sports economist. They weave academic analysis and anecdotes from individual players, managers, and teams across the world into a highly readable and entertaining book about the most popular sport in the world. It would have been more fun in undergraduate economics to learn game theory through penalty kicks or regression analysis through soccer examples.

What do large financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers and soccer clubs have in common, and how do they differ? Both are subject to moral hazard (risky behavior is not penalized), because they are usually bailed out. Alas this not always the case—as the example of Lehman Brothers recently showed—but, surprisingly, soccer clubs seldom disappear. Yes, some clubs might go bankrupt (for example, Fiorentina, Leeds United), but according to Kuper and Szymanski, soccer clubs are among the most stable businesses around. Even the few that are not bailed out often reappear with a new name, money, and the same fans and swiftly move up the ranks to the highest league again (Fiorentina, for example). Although banks make enormous profits in good times, soccer clubs are in general unprofitable. The authors find no correlation between league position and profit. Yet, interestingly, soccer players’ salaries explain almost all the variation in English Premier League positions. But the next time your favorite English team announces a multimillion-pound “transfer deal of the year,” don’t get too excited: spectacular transfers do not necessarily correlate with the team’s subsequent league position in the standing.

We also learn that hosting the World Cup or European Cup reduces suicides in European countries, Norway is apparently the most enthusiastic soccer country in Europe, Iraq is among the best overperformers in world soccer, and 50 percent of British ticket holders don’t take up their seats the next season. While bank customers usually stick with their bank unless there’s a bank run, soccer fans don’t seem to be very loyal. In addition, hosting large sports tournaments doesn’t yield any profits or many economic benefits, but it does increase people’s happiness—a finding drawn from the influential field of happiness economics. So even though South Africa is likely to lose money on the forthcoming World Cup, it might be a happier nation this fall—not to mention all the other participating African countries that could reap empowerment, pride, and happiness from the South Africa–hosted World Cup.

What are some of the limitations of the book? The empirical evidence is at times overly focused on England. Economists tend to be a skeptical species (except maybe when it came to rational expectations or efficient markets), so more evidence from other countries would certainly help generalize some of the findings. Also, in general, the explanation of why poor countries do worse at sports—poor nutrition, exposure to disease, lack of networking, and organizational issues—is compelling. But it does not explain why African countries do so well in the FIFA Under-17 and Under-20 soccer World Cups. Nigeria is the most successful U-17 team besides Brazil, with three titles, and the current U-20 world champion is Ghana.

One question for globalizers is when countries such as China and India will make their mark in the soccer world. Brazil, one of their cousins in the so-called BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—has the best national soccer team in the world; the other, Russia, made it to the European Cup semifinals two years ago.

Finally, a word of caution to any soccer manager with a large budget: don’t buy the stars from the World Cup in South Africa. They tend to be overvalued. Buy players in their early twenties and players whose personal problems you can solve (both tend to be undervalued).

Soccernomics is highly recommended not only for soccer fans but for anyone who is interested in how economics tools apply to the wonderful world of soccer.

Heiko Hesse

Economist, IMF; former professional soccer player for Borussia Dortmund; and featured in the German documentaries Die Champions and the forthcoming HalbZeit