Pitchside Planet: One Man, One Ball, 100 Countries

When a data-obsessed football journalist packs a single match-ball, a notebook, and a pressure gauge, the result is a 60,000-mile sprint across five continents and one hundred national associations. Pitchside Planet trades postcard prose for hard metrics: decibel spikes in Buenos Aires, VAR lag times in Seoul, card-per-minute ratios in Montevideo, and carbon kilos burned in the thin air above Quito. From Ta' Qali's limestone terraces to a midnight penalty shoot-out under Greenland's polar glow, every chapter is anchored to verifiable timestamps, stadium deeds, and broadcast reach.

Yet the story beneath the spreadsheets is human-a chronicle of mat?fuelled riot police, synthetic-turf climate grants, and the mathematicians who model altitude into expected goals. As each whistle sounds, the author audits the sport's expanding carbon ledger and asks whether football's global heartbeat is genuinely louder or merely faster.

Part travelogue, part forensic report, part love letter to the world's simplest game, Pitchside Planet is the definitive account of modern ground-hopping at full statistical tilt.