For a time, Gwendolyn Oxenham, who had been an accomplished soccer player at Duke University, thought she might have a future in the game as a professional. When that didn’t work out, she decided to make herself a writer. The proof that she was successful is “Finding the Game,’’ an engrossing account of what she and three companions discovered when they traveled the world looking for pick-up soccer games.

Though Oxenham characterizes herself and her fellow explorers as “naïve idiots,” it is their innocence that leads them to believe not only that they will find amateur players happy to kick a ball around with American strangers in unlikely places but that they will attract folks who’ll fund their adventure as it bumps along from continent to continent.