How I managed to be nearly unaware of this book (and not read it) for 15 years is something of a mystery. I should have heard of it, made note of it, bought it and read it in 1999, when it was published.

The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, by Joe McGinniss.

McGinniss died earlier this year, and I remember seeing in his obit that he had written a book about his 1996-97 season “embedded” with a smalltown Italian soccer team, Castel di Sangro, that had managed to work its way up to Serie B — Italy’s second division.

Fifteen years after it was published, I went looking for the book.

It is not available on Kindle, and also is out of print, befitting what appears to be its apparent place in his oeuvre — sports, and thus not serious.

Fortunately, a co-worker purchased a copy of the book (paper, and everything; handy for looking at the map and the roster!) while in the U.S. recently, and loaned it to me, and I now have consumed it.

My take?

It is the best awful soccer book ever written by an American. Or worst great.

It has hundreds of pages of insight into into this oh-so-strange (but perhaps not unique?) club located in a tiny town in the mountains of Abruzzo, one of Italy’s more obscure regions.

We have McGinniss to thank for that.

But he then goes about 95 percent of the way to ruining it by injecting himself into the narrative over and again.

I think it is fair to say this was McGinniss’s “middle-age-crazy” book.

He was already well-known for true crime books as well as political books, beginning with The Selling of the President, which appeared in 1969.

In 1996, he was 53, appalled at how the O.J. Simpson trial had ended, and gave up what he said was $1 million to write about it — and instead takes himself over to Italy to follow this tiny team.

Meantime, he had, barely two years before, decided he was a rabid soccer fan while watching the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. He certainly was not the only American to have that reaction to the big event, but he may have been one of the oldest — American men born in the 1940s are pretty much immune to latter-life conversion to calcio-worship.

He follows Alexi Lalas (a 1994 U.S. team member) to Italy to watch him play for Padova, and eventually picks up on the story of Castel di Sangro, which has worked its way up the long ladder of Italian soccer to the second rung from the top and hopes it can somehow stay there.

And away we go.

Let’s trace his objectionable handling of great material in an ascending fashion of annoyance.

–Within minutes, he refers to Castel di Sangro as “we” and “us”. For a man who began his career as a journalist, this is unacceptable. For non-journalists, the notion of his instant decision that he is part of a we or an us must ring hollow, too. No instant sports fans are allowed — especially in soccer.

–His heightened attachment to team and town feels more than a little like he has created and become the only member of a sort of religious cult. His devotion knows no bounds. As in the “us” and “we” thing, his objectivity is gone immediately, and the reader becomes wary. Or should.

–Like many non-sports writers, he believes he has a purer and better-developed vision of the game than people who write sports for a living. Which is crazy; sports writers rarely suggest they have a firmer grasp of politics than political writers.

–He reinforces that he is having a sort of emotional crisis on page 64, when he declares, at the end of Castel di Sangro’s first match: “My heart filled with joy. Finally, at the age of fifty-three, I had been united with my people.”

His “people” being Castel di Sangro fans, and players — for whom he risen from his place in the press tribune to shout “Bravo Castel di Sangro!” at the end of their opening victory. His “people” apparently not being his family and friends back in the States.

–His regular insistence on trying to get the team’s coach to use his (the author’s) suggested formations and lineups — based on his two years of soccer observation. It is astonishing and indicates a stunning lack of self-awareness. He second-guesses the coach, to his face (from his position as a fan/author with access to the team) so often that it is another “miracle” that the coach goes most of the season before he tells off “Coach McGinniss” in the most picturesque of terms.

–He seems to make a point of antagonizing a man who appears to be the local crime kingpin, allowing his emotions to take control of him (again) rather than show some professional cool and observe. Probably to show his righteous wrath.

–In the second half of the book, McGinniss pretty much gives up his reporting role and spends much of his attention taking his own emotional temperature. It is beyond intrusive, it is the self-regard of the published author run amok.

(One reader, reviewing the book, nailed it when he wrote: “His book should’ve been called ‘Joe McGinniss Goes to Italy So That Joe McGinniss Can Talk to Italians and Report on how They React to Joe McGinniss’, by Joe McGinniss.”)

At the end of 404 pages, McGinniss has enjoyed exhilaration with Castel di Sangro but also deep disillusion. Which seems fitting, because this book is both infuriating and riveting.