The miracle of the Miracle of Castel di Sangro

One of the surprising lessons of reading lots of footballers’ autobiographies is that while they are quick to say that they don’t pay attention to the media, one thing that does seem to draw their attention – and often their ire – is player ratings. That is, the ratings given to players for their performance in a given game.

To be fair, if we were all subject to a system that reduced our week’s work to a rating out of ten, we might all find it hard to resist taking a look.

The French sports newspaper L'Équipe is famously stingy with its ratings, giving a mere 6/10 for a ‘very good’ performance. Two years ago, when Paris Saint Germain lost 4-1 to Newcastle, Kylian Mbappé was one of two PSG players to receive a 2/10. Ouch.

The Dynamo Football Bookclub is not quite as begrudging with our ratings as a Parisien football journalist, but it has taken us nearly 50 books to find a 10/10 book. But in Episode 47, we found one – Joe McGinness’ Miracle of Castel Di Sangro.

This is an obscure book in many ways. McGinness was an American journalist famous for books on political heavyweights such as Richard Nixon and Teddy Kennedy. In his Wikipedia entry, Castel di Sangro gets only a passing mention.

But to anyone who reads sports books, this is a classic of the genre.

It is an unusual story, in which this American journalist with no previous interest in football – or soccer, as we should probably call it here – decides to jet off to Italy to follow the fortunes of a team from Castel Di Sangro, a town of 5,000 people in the mountains of poor and rugged Abruzzo, tucked away in the back of Italy’s knee. The town is the smallest ever to have a team promoted to Serie B and McGinness, for whatever reason, decides he needs to be there to cover it.

But he doesn’t just cover it, he is every bit as embedded in the team as an American journalist reporting on the Iraq War from inside an armoured vehicle.

Arriving with no Italian, no connections, no particular knowledge of soccer, or indeed of Italy, McGinness wiggles his way into the inner sanctum of the team. The club owner, a shady local business mogul we are given to believe may have certain illegitimate business interests, gives him an apartment, and it is not long before the team’s coach has him reffing games in training.

The author may have been soccer’s quickest ever convert from non-fan to ultra. This guy lives and breathes the games, admitting later when he wrote the book to losing grasp of reality as he hyperventilated and palpitated his way through a season in which the team were fighting to stay in the division — for La Salvezza, salvation.

It is possible that McGinness could have relocated to Italy for a year and have been witness to a damp squib, but the team’s season was a rollercoaster of scarcely believable twists, turns, highs and lows. These included the arrest of one player for running an international drug cartel, the tragic death of two others in a car accident, and a whole series of other unexpected incidents both on and off the field.

McGinness falls in love with the players. Primarily, the book is intended as a paean to a ragtag bunch of journeymen pros and hopeful upstarts who came together for one incredible season and one amazing story. There are truly compelling characters, a coach who seems to loathe the players and any suggestion that they might try to score a goal, a local restaurant owner who feeds the players and plays the role of their surrogate mother, and a chairman who sleeps with players’ wives, engages in very shady business practices and who, for what it is worth, is now head of the Italian Football Association.

But the character of McGinness is the one who really steals the show. He is, to put it simply, a crazy man. It probably takes a particular type of 54-year-old to abandon his wife and children to follow an unheard of football team, playing an obscure sport in a land far far away. Whatever that type is, McGinness is it. He is an amazing character who stars in this drama of his own making.

In our 48th episode, we covered a similar book. A Season With Verona, in which British literary heavy hitter Tim Parks follows the fortunes of Hellas Verona, an unfashionable team in his adopted home in the north of Italy. That too is a good book. In one of the few matches he attended that year where he sat among the journalists rather than the team’s famously fascist fans, he saw how player ratings were devised. In short, it is not a very scientific process. They just kind of make them up, a 5 here, a 7 there, no particular method, just gut feeling and the whims and biases of the writer in question.

Our system is every bit as unscientific. But for what it is worth, The Miracle of Castel di Sangro is a 5-star book, a glittering gem in the dumpster fire that the genre of football books can sometimes seem. If you happen to make a decision that you are only ever going to read one football book, make it this one.

John Coughlan co-hosts the Dynamo Football Bookclub, a football podcast that reviews footballers’ books. Listen, like and subscribe wherever you get your pods.

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