Soccer Hooligans
Newsletter 2025-03-28
I’ve always felt inadequate when it comes to sports. That’s true for both playing and watching. It takes a special level of incompetence to fail as a passive observer. For most of my life, I regarded athletic competitions as little more than reality TV with a live studio audience. It was hard for me to get invested when I didn’t know the characters and had missed several key episodes in the middle. I didn’t understand the drama of rolling out a new quarterback when I didn’t see the old quarterback get voted off the island. Those gaps made it challenging for me to pull off small talk with other dudes. If I made a comment about the latest Colts game, the other guy might reply with a reference to something that happened in the season finale twenty years ago. I would instantly be exposed as a fraud. I’m too far behind on the sports people care about to ever catch up. That’s why I pivoted to soccer.
Recently, I did a headlong dive into sports as part of my comprehensive strategy for coping with reality and avoiding therapy. I was in over my head with college football and the NFL. I’m roughly a hundred years behind on some rivalries. I picked up the Pacers halfway through their current season. I like basketball because there are fewer names to remember. I know I could just read the back of their jerseys, but that feels like cheating. No matter which franchise I followed, I was hopelessly out of the loop on the lore. Becoming a fan felt like studying for a test. I shouldn’t have to try that hard to care. Then I saw an ad for Major League Soccer. While America’s highest league of what the rest of the world calls football has technically been around for thirty years, many of the teams were established within the last few. More importantly, the start of the new season lined up with the start of my sports obsession. I could catch the upcoming season from day one. For once, I wouldn’t be jumping in halfway through the story and only pretending I knew what was going on. Plus, the whole story was just some guys kicking a ball into a net. Even I could follow that plot. That contrasts sharply with football, where whether or not a catch is actually a catch is decided on a case by case basis by the Supreme Court. Americans claim to hate lawyers but love to litigate every play. Our sports are just Judge Judy with pads and concussion protocols.
The hardest part of picking up soccer was choosing a team.
