Trouble comes in the form of another soccer coach, an ex-con who is envious at the great team Bobo has built. He starts a smear campaign against the Crusaders, culminating with a false accusation that Bobo is a pedophile. The team falls apart and people end up dead, although we only hear about it offhandedly, which seems to be a bit of a chickening out storytelling-wise.

Interwoven with the soccer is the narrator’s own story. Luca’s father is the legitimate son of a made man. Mario is struggling with his mother’s building insanity over losing a daughter in a car accident years ago. He and his wife, Luca’s mother, are having difficulty having another child and Mario ends up unconvincingly having an affair with another soccer mom. Mario also has to deal with his family’s Mafioso legacy, his father and uncles using violence to solve the problems of the family’s trucking business. It is here that St. John of the Midfield breaks down -- it doesn’t need the Mob. I suspect the lengthy delving into Mario’s father’s history was intended as character development, but I found it distracting from what I was really interested in: the soccer.

It seems as though the author had two good ideas for his book -- the soccer and the impact of a connected parent on a legitimate family -- but he didn’t quite have enough material for either story for a full-length novel, so he smushed the two together. Maccagnone should have trusted himself enough to commit to one of his themes. St. John of the Midfield would have worked wonderfully as a long short story by focusing on Bobo and his soccer team, with Mario’s marital woes and Sicilian temper as a counterpoint. As a novel, however, it’s not quite enough.