What, you didn’t see Liverpool play Manchester City last week? Did you miss Wayne Rooney’s 58-yard wonder goal against West Ham United?
There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans – even New Yorkers of the world who regularly tuned into The Guardian’s website and pretending to know the best little isolated pub in Shoreditch – could float in a happy bubble of ignorance, pretending for all intents and purposes that the world’s favorite sport, football, didn’t exist.
This time seems to be fading quickly. With growing fan interest, football is no longer the Kylie Minogue of the sporting world: huge everywhere except here. After years of being hailed as the next big thing, sports (particularly the English Premier League, with its increased presence on American television) has become a topic of conversation you can no longer ignore.
This is particularly evident in New York’s creative circles, where the game’s aesthetics, Europhile appeal, and fashionable otherness have made soccer the new baseball, the sport of choice for the thinking class.
In other words, gone are the days when you could make a joke about David Beckham’s latest hairstyle and be done with the subject (note to newbies: Mr. Beckham, retired from the sport, is now a slot thrower -clothes). These days, smart guys are expected to be familiar with European football. “It’s like you expect someone to know what’s going on in ‘True Detective,'” said David Coggins, the magazine’s editorial director. Freemans Sports Club fashion brand, which writes about European football for A continuous approach And Valet.
While postwar literary lions like John Updike and Philip Roth looked to the diamond to find poetry in sport, the new generation is looking to the field. David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, and David Hirshey, a prominent editor at HarperCollins, are football enthusiasts, and Franklin Foer, editor-in-chief of New Republic, rose to fame with his 2004 book, “How football explains the world.”
A new generation of scholars is now following in their footsteps.
“It’s almost guaranteed that almost every literary man under 45 will know something about football,” said Sean Wilsey, a writer who helped write “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup,” a compilation essays from 2006. by Dave Eggers and Robert Coover. As a conversation starter, it has become a staple at book nights, in part because it is both sophisticated and safe. “Isn’t it a relief to talk about the English Premier League instead of the sad state of publishing?” he added. “It’s a great default topic.”
Among young American writers who grew up on Nick Hornby’s soccer books like “Fever Pitch,” support for Arsenal, Mr. Hornby’s club of choice, is almost de rigeur, said Rosie Schaap, a born memoirist. in the United States who considers herself a murderer. Huge Tottenham Hotspur fan. (She also writes the monthly Drink column for The New York Times Magazine).
“Every time I’m at a reading party or reading, and football comes up in the conversation, I find myself surrounded by young men in shabby, baggy tweed jackets gushing about the Gunners,” Ms Schaap said . “In such contexts, being an Arsenal supporter is even more predictable than having an MFA or a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.”
For fashionable types with an internationalist bent, supporting (never supporting) a Premier League club (never a team) is not just a pleasant diversion, but a public display of global cultural literacy.
This perhaps explains why, last Sunday at 8:30 a.m., a lively crowd of fans with tattoos and carefully rolled jeans showed up at Kidding, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with plank floors that caters to Premier League fans. With several Steven Gerrard jerseys and team scarves emblazoned with Liverpool’s team motto, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, they settled in for a crucial live match between Liverpool and Manchester City.
Of course, anyone could have watched the game at home, thanks to NBC Universal’s $250 million deal to view all Premier League matches. But football — a term that some Americans have learned to embrace without wincing — is a communal experience, even when you grew up 3,000 or 6,000 miles from the community you adopted as your sporting home.
“You buy into the history, tradition and values of the club,” said Bryan Lee, a digital brand strategist who grew up in Southern California and lives in Greenpoint. He showed up in a vintage gray Liverpool away jersey. “Historically, Liverpool has been a working-class port city,” added Mr. Lee, 24, as thoughtful as if he were giving his oral exam at university. “Liverpool’s policies were very anti-Thatcher. It has become the people’s club. These hard-working, working-class values never really disappeared, although they were brought into the club’s modern era as a global franchise.
In a neighborhood that places a premium on authenticity, soccer offers plenty of it — at least compared to the gaudy, eye-popping TV broadcasts of American team sports. Unlike American football, there are no commercial breaks to disrupt the flow of action for 90 minutes, except at half-time. The rest of the world already knows football as “the beautiful game”. Aesthetically conscious Americans have finally understood this too.
“Football is perfect for this neighborhood, it’s the alternative sport, it’s the cool sport,” said Michael Coogan, 30, a production assistant with flowing dark hair who lives nearby. “Williamsburg is too cool for everything.”
Until a few years ago, American converts seemed to tiptoe onto the field, as if they weren’t sure they belonged. They hesitantly pronounced foreign terms like table instead of classification, or kit instead of uniform.
This was not the case last Sunday 11th Street Baran Irish-style pub in the East Village where members of the Liverpool FC Supporters’ Club NYC gathered at 7:30 a.m. for the Manchester City match.
When Liverpool midfielder Philippe Coutinho scored a goal 12 minutes from time, the red-clad crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder, erupted. Many joined in a guttural rendition of a traditional Liverpool fan chant: “Oh, when the Reds come marching!” » A burly young fan, aged around 30, grabbed a wooden bar stool and began pounding it on the ground in celebration, calling for the crowd to go “mental.” The accents were American, but the passion was real.
Certainly, football-loving Americans no longer need to look abroad to satisfy their hunger. Domestic Major League Soccer attracted six million fans last year, and ties to European soccer are stronger than ever (next year the league will add a second metro-area team, New York City FC , a joint venture between the Yankees and Manchester City). No wonder football proselytizers insist, with some justification, that the Big Four of American team sports have become the Big Five.
Yet football remains, in the eyes of many Americans, a global sport. And this global sport is booming in the United States thanks to the explosion of foreign soccer on television and the Internet.
When Roger Bennett, a New York-based football pundit who grew up in Liverpool, moved to the United States in 1996, he remembers having to follow Everton’s big games by phone, his father manning the receiver in front of the radio at home. Today, cable television is full of soccer: the Spanish La Liga, the German Bundesliga, the Italian Serie A and the Mexican Liga MX. On the Internet, fans can follow matches from the Italian second division, watch Brazilian highlights on YouTube and find out the latest gossip from VfB Stuttgart. In fact, Mr. Bennett has become a leading evangelist for converts to American football through his popular speech. Men in blazers football talk show Concession land and SiriusXM, which he hosts with Michael Davies.
“It’s often said that baseball exploded in America during the radio era and that the NFL became dominant once television took over,” Mr. Bennett said. “Football is the perfect sport for the Internet age. American fans can watch games and instantly follow news from global leagues big and small, feeling as close to their favorite teams as if they were living in a beer dump near their stadium.
Despite plenty of soccer offerings from around the world, and right here at home, the Premier League remains the fashionable choice for many New York creative types, according to Mark Kirby, a former GQ editor who in 2012, contributed to founding Howlera sumptuous football quarterly which was hailed by The Guardian as “a football magazine worthy of aesthetes”.
“We noticed all our friends were trying to figure out which team to support in England,” he said.
He cited several reasons explaining the craze for English football in particular: the omnipresence of the Premier League on television, the absence of a language barrier. And of course there is garden-variety Anglophilia.
Mr. Bennett, for his part, suggested another: the early start of matches in bars.
“You should never underestimate the appeal of daytime drinking,” Mr Bennett said. “If you’re in a bar at 7 a.m. with a pint of Guinness, you have a social problem. If you’re in a bar at 7am with the same pint of Guinness and Chelsea is on the TV, you’re a football fan.
