In a conversational monologue, a middle‑aged American sports fan recounts how, over the past six months, his lifelong focus on baseball, American football, hockey and basketball has shifted toward the global sport known as football (soccer). He credits the recent World Cup’s media spotlight—especially the U.S. team’s participation—as the catalyst that opened his eyes to football’s worldwide influence. His curiosity led him to the English game, where he discovered a massive, historically rich club ecosystem (about 1,600 clubs, 80 professional teams across four divisions, plus a 92‑team League Cup). He marvels at the English league’s promotion/relegation dynamism, the constant player movement and loan system, and the growing foreign ownership of clubs, noting American and Gulf‑state investors and comparing payrolls (e.g., New York Yankees vs. Manchester City). He observes the expanding U.S. media coverage of English football (ESPN, Fox Soccer) and links the sport’s rising popularity among American youth to safety concerns in American football. Concluding, he predicts a substantial surge in soccer’s U.S. popularity, foreseeing cultural ripple effects both in America and in England.
Chapters
You know, I'm a middle-aged American sports fan. Late middle age. And what that means is that for most of my life, I've concentrated my interest on 4 sports: baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. Mostly college basketball. Now, what I've noticed is that over the past 6 months, I've become interested in a new sport, and that is what the rest of the world calls football and what we call soccer. Let me tell you why. You know, the World Cup this past summer was probably the third or fourth time that I've really spent any energy watching the World Cup, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, of course, the American team qualified and did fairly well, but there was a tremendous amount of media attention paid to the World Cup in general, to the American team in particular. And what that did was it really opened my eyes widely to just how powerful a global force football really is. Now When I started to look at soccer as a sport, it immediately took me to the English game. Why? Well, England is the recognized home of the game, and the English professional leagues are a destination for players from all over the world. I would see during the World Cup, for example, that there were players who were now playing for their home countries. Spain, for example, has several players on their World Cup-winning team who play in England during the regular club season, it's called. I now have a whole new vocabulary to go with my interest in this sport. And I started seeing that, you know, England really is the drawing card. For all of this global soccer interest for much of the year. Then I noticed that there was— so I started to look at the, at the English system for organizing their football league. I was totally blown away. First of all, there are like 1,600 clubs in England. It's not that big of a country. Professionally, there are these 4 different divisions: First Division, Second Division, Championship, and Premier. Each of them has, I think, about 20 teams. So there's 80 professional teams. And then there's this thing that they do every year too for the championship of the whole country, the League Cup, I think it's called. And there's 92 teams that compete in that. And I was thinking, holy mackerel, and what would I started to do, which is what I always do, is to research the history of English football. And certainly not— haven't done that exhaustively, but I've done it to the point where I've become very, very interested in the, you know, roughly 150-year history, somewhere around that, of these English football clubs. Now, You know, there are, there are 5 teams in London, for example, right now in the Premier League. You know, the 5 teams, they hate each other, these supporters of these 5 teams. It's, it makes for rabid kind of, of interest among fans. There's a dynamism to English football that is quite, I think, quite unique in that you may be in the Premier League this year, but the bottom 3 teams from the Premier League every year get relegated down to the Champions League, the Championship League, and the champ— and the 3 top teams get promoted to the Premier League. Oh my goodness, the anxiety! Ah, the pride! We're about to be promoted! So there's, there's a dynamism there in the structure of the game that's fascinating. There's also a dynamism in the personnel that I think is, is unique. For example, players move around from team to team, and not just in England, although that's been my focus, but between English teams and teams from other countries—Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal. There's a constant movement and there's loaning of players and selling of players. And so there's that kind of dynamism going on. Now there's a tremendous amount of financial focus being placed on English football. There are— and I don't know that this is accurate, so take it for what it is, which is I think this is right. I know there are at least 3 teams in the English Premier League that are owned by owners from other countries. Maybe it's more than that, maybe it's 4. And there are now 2 teams owned by American owners. Um, let's see, uh, Manchester United, which is, you know, one of the top biggest teams in, in, in England, is owned by an— by Americans. And now Liverpool, which has just been through a psychodrama that is really unprecedented, moved from one American set of owners to another American set of owners, the second American set of owners being the owners of the Boston Red Sox, for Pete's sake, who now bought Liverpool. So there's that kind of dynamism going on. There's a tremendous amount of, of interest in buying teams from Gulf states. There are at least two teams, I think, now I forget the one that was just— well, I know that Manchester City is owned by a Gulf, by a sheikh who just put an amount of money that we in America think of as extraordinary as a payroll, for example, is becoming much more commonplace. For example, the New York Yankees have a payroll of, I don't know, roughly $230 million a year. Manchester City, the team owned by this Sheikh, has a payroll of £250 or so million. The, the amount of interest that is now growing in English football all over the world reflected in the amount of media coverage that English football now gets in the United States, where you see games on ESPN every week, for example. Fox has a soccer channel here in the US that's on satellite television. And add that to the fact that parents of American youngsters are having a difficult time encouraging their sons, in particular, to play American football. The, um, the physics of American football, being a collision sport, are such that as players get bigger, faster, and stronger, the kinds of collisions that are inevitable in that sport become more and more dangerous with more and more injuries, particularly head injuries, becoming a big concern, um, for fans, but for parents, I think, in particular. Uh, if you have a 10-year-old son nowadays and your 10-year-old son comes to you and wants to play football, you have to think twice about whether or not that's a wise parental decision, particularly when there is now this alternative athletic, um, uh, opportunity, and that is soccer, which is now becoming a much more popular and much more intriguing kind of option. All of this is a long way to say I think that, um, we're about to see a huge growth of soccer here in America, which has been on the precipice of growing for decades, but which has never really caught on. I think that's about to change, and I think there are a lot of cultural factors that are playing into that, all of which is about to create also some enormous anxiety in England as they see their national pastime, as we call baseball, beginning to become— to change pretty dramatically. From, I think, what it's been historically for them. So anyway, um, I'm gonna keep watching that because I think there's something happening, and I always like to see what's happening. So I'll see you out there, see if you see anything. Take it easy.
