Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts

Sebastian Abbot ’98 first heard about Football Dreams, an ambitious Qatari-backed talent search that aimed to identify promising soccer prospects in Africa, when he was an Associated Press correspondent in Cairo. He returned to the subject a few years later, digging deeper into the story by profiling three of the program’s prominent players for a new book, The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer’s Next Superstars. The book is Abbot’s first, and writing it was tremendously rewarding, he says. “If you have an idea that you feel passionate enough about and that you sort of can’t stand the idea of a book not being written about that subject, then I would dive in — but do it with eyes wide open,” he says. “It’ll be harder than anything you’ve ever done.”