National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball And the Rest of the World Plays Soccer

In their innovative book, National Pastime, Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist compare the histories and institutional structures of baseball—the U.S. national pastime—and soccer—the major sport in the rest of the world. Their indepth, cross-cultural assessment of these huge mega-businesses, particularly Major League Baseball and the English Premier League, examines what makes each sport successful and details how administrators in each can learn from the other. Since National Pastime was first published, Malcolm Glazer, the owner of an American football team, took over one of the biggest soccer clubs in the world; Major League Baseball staged the World Baseball Classic in imitation of the soccer World Cup; and the leading soccer clubs in Europe have threatened to form an independent league modeled after the U.S. major leagues. The updated paperback edition contains a new preface, which provides fresh insight into the ongoing globalization of these great national pastimes.