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Retailers have kicked off promotions they hope will score some extra sales during the World Cup, although many believe any serious boosts will be dependent on how England fare in the tournament.
Many Waterstones stores are pushing translated fiction, showcasing displays of works from authors representing each nation in the tournament. Its Non-fiction Book of the Month is The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know about Football is Wrong by Chris Anderson and David Sally (Penguin). Blackwell’s has also championed translated fiction, featuring titles written by authors from countries playing in each day’s fixtures at the front of stores.
Ray Mattinson, who designed Blackwell’s Oxford Street display, said: “England is represented by David Peace’s Red or Dead (Faber) and The Damned United (Faber) while Paulo Coehlo provides one of Brazil’s entries and W G Sebald’s Austerlitz (Penguin) is representing Germany.”
Indies have also used the World Cup to get a leg up with sales. The Big Green Bookshop’s two London stores are offering a three-for-two deal on all books and toys for as long as England remains in the competition. Walkers Bookshops have window displays dedicated to a “sporting summer”, which will include the Tour de France after the World Cup has finished.
Despite the flurry of activity, retailers are divided over whether the tournament will boost sales overall.
James Daunt, m.d. of Waterstones, said: “When the weather is good it always brings a sales dip. With the World Cup, if England kick off at 11 p.m., it is unlikely to impact us in terms of people watching the game instead of coming into the shop. But in terms of confidence affecting sales, losing in the first game wasn’t great, but I am sure if England do well, it have a better impact because everyone will be more buoyant. We will have to see how long we stay in the tournament to see what happens.”
Tim Walker, president of the Booksellers Association and owner of Walkers Bookshops, agreed that sporting events coupled with sunny weather often meant a decline in sales, although Father’s Day had partially offset that. “Generally, we find during major sporting events that retail sales are depressed—it is almost the same as the Olympics. Sales tend to dip because people are spending their time watching sport instead of reading or shopping,” he said.
Meanwhile, publishers have welcomed the jump in sales of their football-themed books.
Carlton Books has published five official World Cup tie-ins, including the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Official Book, which has been the top-selling sports book (excluding memoirs) in the UK for the past five weeks. Rachel Nicholson, head of publicity at Carlton, said: “Demand has outstripped supply in the UK resulting in all five titles being out of stock before the tournament started.”
Yellow Jersey Press has published Jogo Bonito: Pelé, Neymar and Brazil’s Beautiful Game by Swedish journalist Henrik Brandão Jönsson, and the imprint is also running a World Cup competition on Twitter.
Pitching a different approach, Headline has published a free e-book, Football Clichés: World Cup Guide by Adam Hurrey, to attract interest for the hardback, published in October (see below). Richard Roper, non-fiction editor at Headline, said: “There are some football books out now—such as memoirs from Terry Venables and Jimmy Bullard—which may well be seeing an upside from World Cup fever, and obviously we have used that to get exposure for Football Clichés.
“A lot will depend on how England do, of course. Publishers are very adept at moving quickly and if England somehow find themselves in with a shot of winning, then there is plenty of potential for books to come out of that,” Roper added.
Sensible soccer: Pirlo leads intellectual pick
It is somewhat surprising that the bestselling book by a current footballer in the first week of the 2014 World Cup is authored by the man chiefly responsible for England’s 2-1 defeat by Italy—Azzurri maestro Andrea Pirlo’s I Think Therefore I Play (BackPage Press) shifted 1,169 copies through Nielsen BookScan.
Pirlo’s success—the book had a week-on-week sales rise of 32%, and has sold 10,000 units since 15th April—reflects two trends for football books: a World Cup sales boost, but also a concerted move by publishers towards general, cult and “smarter” football books; the William Hill end of the spectrum, if you will.
Football titles had a Copa du Mondo rise last week. In the week before the start of the World Cup, 44 football-themed titles hit the TCM Top 5,000, worth £154,000. Last week, that number skyrocketed to 71 books with revenue up 99% (£308,000). Partially this has to do with a few recent releases designed to tap into the football frenzy. There were week on week volume rises for Harry Redknapp’s Always Managing (Ebury, up 78%), Terry Venables’ Born to Manage (Simon & Schuster, +111%) and the 2014 World Cup Brazil Official Book (Carlton, +88%).
Yet what is driving the bulk of sales is more general football titles, with publishers perhaps wary of paying big advances for homegrown footballers’ memoirs. There were strong weeks for titles that were undoubtedly pitched by agents as “Moneyball for football”, including Chris Anderson and David Sally’s The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know about Football is Wrong (Penguin, 2,209 units, up 99.7%) and Simon Kuper’s Soccernomics (HarperSport, +201%).
There is also a trend for what may roughly be called the cult player memoir—foreign footballers who have never plied their trade in England (Pirlo, Swedish superstar Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic), beloved journeymen (Jimmy Bullard’s Bend it Like Bullard, Clarke Carlisle’s You Don’t Know Me But . . .); and riches-to-rags stories (Keith Gillespie’s How Not to be a Football Millionaire).
Aligned with this are titles that might vie for sports book awards, such as recent hits Michael Calvin’s The Nowhere Men (Arrow) and David Goldblatt’s Futebol Nation (Penguin).
Will bookshops in general have a World Cup boost? Early results are positive: last week, £23.3m was spent on physical books in the UK, a 7.5% rise week on week. Yet it was also Father’s Day—a holiday neatly dovetailing with football books. Last week’s figure was a 25.8% decline on the TCM in the first week of the 2010 World Cup, and a shallower 10% fall from 2006—not unexpected given the overall slump in physical sales—but it was a 25% jump on the comparative period in 2002.
However, there is one constant among the BookScan World Cup stats: sales rise when England gets knocked out. There is a consistent 8%–9% jump in the overall weekly TCM in the course of World Cups after England has exited the competition, compared to the weeks the team is still in contention. Unpatriotic it might be, but an England exit at the group stage this year will probably help sales.