Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity is a vital and deeply personal testament to self, family, community, culture, and sport.
Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays soccer from a young age, learning early on that while sport can lead to exhilarating experiences and community-building, it can also be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realize about sport's troubled relationship with race, gender, and sexuality-and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.
Formidable, poetic, and impassioned, Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity is improbably many things at once, simultaneously a rumination on sport, relationship to land, Indigenous rights, trans inclusion, and race. Van Neerven weaves broad cultural touchstones, such as Zinedine Zidane's red card in the 2006 World Cup finals, with quiet moments playing soccer with their family, biking to and from practice, detailing a competitive and amorous relationship with a teammate, and simply enthralled by observing the landscape.
Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven's unrivalled talent and courage. * Longlisted, 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
* Winner, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2024 - Non-Fiction.
* Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2024.
"Though this book covers many topics, it never feels weighed down as Van Neerven skillfully interweaves stories set on the soccer field with meditations on Indigenous sovereignty and societal erasure. Here, the personal is explicitly political, as Van Neerven discusses the intersection of gender and racial identity in an elite sporting world. This is a multifaceted gem that deeply engages the reader."
-Sara Duff, Booklist
"Personal Score is at once an analysis of the coloniality of sport and the Indigeneity of sport. Its scope is breathtakingly vast-Ellen van Neerven weaves together the autobiographical, the historical, and the sociopolitical so expertly, and, in doing so, demonstrates a new way to write toward Indigenous freedom. Personal Score hums with the vitality and intelligence of a definitive text."
-Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body and A Minor Chorus
"[A] brilliant collection of essays in which Ellen van Neerven masterfully interrogates [soccer's] relationship to the land, to First Nations, to tradition, to sexuality and to gender."
-Karla J. Strand, Ms Magazine
"A thought-provoking and complex look at the different factors that come into play whenever sports are involved."
-Tobias Carroll, InsideHook
"I've always been interested in books that drill down on a specific topic in such a way that we also learn something unexpected about the world around us. Australian writer Van Neerven's sports memoir is so much more than that, as they explore the relationship between sports and race, gender, and sexuality-as well as the paradox of playing a colonialist sport on Indigenous lands."
-Claire Kirch, The Millions
Winner, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2024 - Non-Fiction
"Ellen van Neerven's remarkable memoir Personal Score seduces with its synthesis of poetry and political critique, grounded in a strong sense of place. It is essential reading for its insights into settler colonial violence, gender and sexuality, climate justice and-of course-football. And it is also a reflection on family, friendship, love, pride, and the joy of kicking goals. Van Neerven describes Personal Score as 'an ugly book that was born of the ugly language that I grew up hearing in this country.' Yet it is a pleasure to read their account of the years during which 'I am the parts of me that don't know what I know now'-and to learn from them what it is they now know." -Judges' repo
