In the first of a new book review series, Goal USA's Jon Arnold reviews Michael Agovino's "Soccer Diaries."

Into The Book is a new monthy series in which Goal USA's Jon Arnold reviews a soccer book of interest to American soccer fans.

Soccer in America didn’t start in 1996 with the birth of MLS. It didn’t start in 1994 when the United States hosted a World Cup. It didn’t start with Paul Caligiuri’s shot in 1989.

The game’s past in this country is too easy to forget in today’s modern era, with MLS set to receive more prominent television coverage than ever, the Premier League at the touch of a button and at least one soccer pub in nearly every major city.

The evolution of soccer coverage in the country from newsgroups, to BigSoccer, to sites like this one dedicated to covering the sport on a daily basis, to instant reaction, to retweeted rosters on Twitter does display how the game has grown. But there was a national team, professional leagues and European games on television — you just had to know where to look.

It’s in these Dark Ages that Michael J. Agovino’s “The Soccer Diaries: An American’s Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game” begins before moving into sections he calls The Renaissance and The Enlightenment. Times have changed. My, how they’ve changed. On more than one occasion Agovino cajoles his father into getting a money order to send off for a soccer book. He treasures those books, gleaning every bit of information he can as he feeds his addiction to the beautiful game.

It’s a story familiar to many who have been seduced by the sport’s charms and, like so many of us, the author organizes his life in this memoir not by birthdays or personal milestones but by matches seen, whether on television or in person.

The difficulty with a memoir is often convincing the reader to care. Why should I, who doesn’t know Michael Agovino from Adam (aside from a few conversations we had when, full disclosure, he edited four freelance stories I wrote for another outlet) care about his life? But the anecdotes shared and the glimpses he gives into each match, the color and emotion he communicates, keep that worry from entering the mind.

In fact, I was left wishing the author had spent more time talking about himself and less time on some of the characters he was lucky to see. He mentions in passing the bond he and his sister share over the game but moves on without explaining more, even when they visit a stadium in adulthood. Agovino is often in Switzerland with his girlfriend, Andrea, but she appears only when he convinces her to attend a match or she introduces him to a soccer-loving friend.

It’s not the purpose of the book, but when there are asides, they’re tremendous. In one, Agovino weighs the feelings of solidarity with the lower class with an unkind act from a street cleaner. In another, he cracks up his girlfriend with an imitation of Swiss locals. The absence of more extrapolation on his personal relationships with people like his sister, his girlfriend and several writer friends forces the reader to either believe that sport shapes the only experiences worth telling — unlikely, as the author shares his thoughts on some of his other interests including a deep love for film and jazz — or find the portrait incomplete.

What isn’t incomplete, though, is the author’s memory of the matches that shaped his life. Agovino had the privilege to see some of the game’s greats and takes the the reader to each stadium he went to and explains the matches with childlike wonder. Even when it seems he is falling out of love with the game in the middle portion of both the book and his life, the writer finds subtle joy in seeing soccer in a film or spotting coverage of the game in a mainstream media outlet.

That delight is what permeates through the memoir, and it’s one fans of the sport already can associate with. Those fans might get a bit bogged down by the detailed explanations Agovino gives of topics that would already be familiar to them. But they will enjoy the nostalgia of a bygone era and later analysis of how soccer has grown in the United States, the corruption that exists in FIFA, and how art interacts with football and vice versa.

“The Soccer Diaries” won’t change your life, but it might change how you see the game. At the very least, Agovino’s journey will make soccer fans reflect on their own path on the lifelong love affair they have with the game they just can’t quit, no matter when that path started.