“Yes. The books I’ve chosen are very broadly oriented, but the one aspect they all have in common is that soccer is both primary and secondary at the same time. Soccer is the reason for the books being written, but the writers’ interest is everything that goes on outside the stadium. Which makes it more effective and more interesting than writing that just covers the game itself, which is very hard to describe. As Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, says, ‘Football is faster than words.’ It’s very hard to capture, but it becomes something more transcendent when you look at what happens outside the arena.” (Five Books)