“I’m a stranger here myself…”

By: Sean | October 1st, 2008

You know it is not an easy thing to be a soccer fan in America.

You are a member of an almost fringe fraternity, relegated to somewhere near the bottom of the sports-entertainment pantheon behind baseball, basketball (even behind ice hockey) on a level just barely above bowling and curling. The secret handshake-like gestures of kinship and unity that bind the followers of the major sports—the celebratory chest-bumps, “the Wave,” and the like…they are denied to you. You won’t be leaping from your bar stool at Applebee’s to cheer a glorious strike with your friends. No, instead, you’ll be quietly nursing your Budweiser or margarita while the guys at the table next to you excitedly watch stock cars race ad nauseum around in circles. You’ll assert your club identity in ways both bold and subtle. You’ll sport your Manchester United home jersey to the mall, surrounded by Lakers t-shirts, Patriots jackets and Mariners ball caps. Perhaps someone will notice the strange cut of your colors and recognize it as that “soccer team Beckham used to play on,” but most likely not. Your strange team mascot will make you invisible even in plain sight. You’ll get used to this until, at some odd moment that you weren’t expecting, you’ll find someone else (probably a younger kid or an expatriate) also sporting a European club crest on their sweatshirt. The words “Barcelona FC” or Liverpool’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” will fill you with a sense of familiarity and, briefly, you will feel a sense of connection with this stranger, like encountering another American when traveling abroad. You may look up and nod knowingly, grateful to find another lover of the Beautiful Game and they, in turn, may also nod back in recognition…until they see you are a Red Devil supporter and good-naturedly mutter, “United sucks.”

As an American soccer fan, you take some comfort in knowing that your tribe, all five billion plus of them, are out there cheering and swearing and following the same squads that you are. However, most all of them are oceans away from you and their cheers are in strange and wonderful languages you likely don’t speak that well. Your statistics are typically not found on ESPN’s “SportsCenter”, with the exception of a few months of MLS scores that merit less air time than the highlights from a pro-am golf tournament featuring Charles Barkley and that guy from “Two and a Half Men”. Instead you are pouring over your laptop at odd hours of the night for updates from the SkySports.com or watching Setanta with almost absolute devotion. Your fantasy teams include guys from Cote d’Ivoire and the Ukraine, not UCLA and Wake Forest. Mondays at your water cooler, as the guys are enthusiastically recounting Manning’s last performance, you smile politely and know that nobody cares about the UEFA Champion’s League Group of Death for which your club has been drawn.

Once every four years, however, those same guys at the water cooler throw you a bone and inquire about the World Cup. Once every four years, you get to chirp up about this match or that goal. If you are really lucky somebody will head butt an opponent or rioting will sweep a major European city based upon a favorable (or unfavorable) result and then you’ll get to chime in about the fervid followings of the game. You’ll also probably segue into a brief discourse on hooliganism. Usually this will only last until the US is knocked out of the group stages or until Brazil loses, at which point the tournament will cease to exist for most of your co-workers and the talk will shift to baseball again. Your moment to revel in the camaraderie of like-minded sport fans is all too brief, but such is your lot in life. You will seek out comfort and consolation when and where you can, probably at a sparsely attended lower division match somewhere near your home.

But like an addiction that requires increasingly stronger doses to fuel the sustained high, sitting in the stands won’t be enough. If you hadn’t already found yourself on the field kicking the ball around on the weekend, you will. Your soccer cleats will become your hypodermic needle and the bruises across your calves and legs will be the tracks that reveal you to be a junkie. Once you drop a shot over the keeper and watch the net ripple in acknowledgement, the Beautiful Game will totally and completely own you. You’ll seek out your hits at the local field with pick-up matches, ever mindful if one side appears to be short of players. “Hey, you guys need an extra?” Time will pass and “shirts and skins” will give way to an actual team with matching jerseys and numbers. Playing “in the middle” will become “playing a holding midfielder with occasional overlaps to the outside on counterattacks” and before you realize it, you are doodling formations and tactics in the margins of your meeting minutes at work. That will satisfy you for a while, maybe a few years, until one day you realize you want everyone else to be following your directions on the field, not just scrimmaging about unguided on their own. You justify the effort to get your own recreational team and make sure others show up to play at the right field, on time, on the right day. Before you know it, you are now referred to as “Coach” or “Skipper” or “The Manager” and the year is no longer characterized by the familiar evolutions of autumn, winter, spring and summer…it is either soccer season or it isn’t.

At least, that’s how it was for me.

I know I’m not alone. I coach against you on Saturday mornings. I play against you on Saturday afternoons. For 40 hours a week I may be trapped in a tie and slacks, but come the weekend, it’s all about the shin guards. That is my passion and I suspect it is yours, too. I may not be able to tell you who was the best left-footed holding midfielder in the Scottish Second Division in 2002, but I roar with joy just as loudly as he did when I score on my men’s recreational team.

I’m a Weekend Warrior and the good folks here at The Offside offered to let me write about the adventures of me and my ibuprofen-pumped brothers and sisters on the recreational soccer side. I’m also a bit new to blogging, so with apologies to author/humorist Bill Bryson for the use of his title as I get underway, I’ll be writing about playing, coaching and living the Beautiful Game, amateur style. I look forward to your comments, stories, and personal experiences.