Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis was perhaps the first book to bring analytics to a broad, non-technical crowd (even if they didn’t realize it). It provided an excellent way to open up a conversation about using data to drive strategic decisions without scaring those who aren’t inclined toward numbers and mathematical calculations. It was a book about baseball, after all. It provided what every technical topic needs: great narrative with stories that the average person can embrace.

Now Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski are putting the same lens on the sport that rivets the rest of the world: soccer. Among the more interesting findings in their book, Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey–and Even Iraq–Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport, is that the much-maligned English national team has been playing better than it should for the past 20 years and that the U.S., China, and India may well dominate the sport in the not too distant future (to read more, check out the NY Times review).

The authors put forward a paradox: soccer as a sport has been averse to using statistical evidence to drive decisions yet “a love of soccer is often intertwined with a love of numbers.” Sounds similar to what Lewis discovered about baseball though soccer teams are rarely money makers (nor are they supposed to be at the national team level according to the authors) so the take is distinct.

If you’ve been looking for a way to illustrate analytics to someone who is a soccer fan, this book is exactly what you are looking for.