The first is from the world of sports. You may be expecting Moneyball, but baseball has always been ripe for analysis — too easy almost. Soccer, though: Now there's a game like the rest of your life — inscrutable, fluid and complex. Forget quantifying every hit or run; some games have no goals at all. Quantify that! But the geeks are starting to notice the beautiful game, and you can read all about it in Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. Do blond-haired

Piggybacking on the success of the pop-econ book Freakonomics, writer Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski have joined forces for Soccernomics. Soccer fan and writer Cord Jefferson explains: "Unlike baseball fans, soccer supporters are notoriously averse to numbers — that's what makes Kuper and Szymanski's research so important. Using data about seemingly unrelated topics — like scoring