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Finn McCool's Football Club - Book

Finn McCool's Football Club - The Birth, Death and Resurrection of a Pub Soccer Team in the City of the Dead is a book about being a soccer fan in the USA.

Although it is also a tale about Hurricane Katrina and life in New Orleans, the storm does not hit the city until halfway through the book. Up until then the story focuses on an Irish bar called Finn McCool's in the Mid-City district: the center of the soccer world in the Crescent City and where both locals and ex-pats gather to watch matches, sometimes as early as 6am.

There is a wide-range of ghost-written autobiographies featuring American soccer players and coaches, but none of them deal with what it is like to be a fan of "the beautiful game" in this country. I examine the hoops fans will jump through to watch games, what it's like to be gathered together in a dark bar with fellow fans on a Saturday morning when it's 90 degrees outside, and how tape-delayed showings mean you have to go to extraordinary lengths just to avoid the score.

I look at the differences between being a supporter back home in the UK where soccer is the national sport and merits wall-to-wall coverage, and what a shock it is to move to Southern Louisiana where the only kind of "football" is played by the Saints and takes place in the Superdome. But there are also advantages to living here, such as how fans of different clubs - even bitter enemies like Rangers and Celtic - can watch games together and interact in ways which would be impossible back home.
 

The book is also my story. I moved to New Orleans five years ago from Belfast, Northern Ireland and I relate how hard it was to settle in a place thousands of miles away geographically and millions of miles away culturally from my home. I find Finn McCool's and soon become a regular, mixing with the many eclectic characters from both the Big Easy and from all over the world who hang out there to watch matches.

Six months after I start going there we form a pub team even though some players have not pulled on boots in decades, and following eight months of training we are about to play competitively when Katrina smashes into the Gulf Coast. The second half of the book tells of our struggle to survive and rebuild in the face of the costliest natural disaster ever to hit the States.

Some guys do not evacuate and have to battle for their lives, either ending up on the roof of a flooded home or forced to swim out past bodies. Finn McCool's takes eight feet of water and many players lose everything they own. The rest of the book deals with what happens to us as we are literally scattered around the world, and how we filter back to New Orleans and try to rebuild our team, our pub and our lives.

The book has received good reviews from soccer magazines and TV soccer reporters both in the States and Europe, and is available in bookstores nationwide as well as online through retailers like Amazon, Borders and Barnes & Noble. If you would like to read more then please visit my website www.stephen-rea.com.

Author of: Finn McCool's Football Club - The Birth, Death and Resurrection of a Pub Soccer Team in the City of the Dead.