Trying to Follow ⚽ as an American Sports Fan

Expectations matter so much in our enjoyment of life. Enjoyment of an experience seems determined less by the quality of that experience and more by the difference of that quality from our expectation.  Have you ever come out of a concert or show disappointed because you were expecting it to be even more amazing? Or have nights etched into your memory because wonderful unexpected shenanigans happened? I enjoy sports because of the unexpected. While well-written dramatic shows and movies may contain fun surprises, we come to expect that unexpected. I go into watching Season 8 of Game of Thrones ready for some twists and incredible reveals. On the other hand, a sporting event can be utterly dull. That final buzzer beater can miss, the winning catch dropped. All those aborted dramatic moments however just serve to make the realized dramatic moments that much more incredible - they are rare enough that we can't expect them to happen. The sheer euphoria of a great sporting moment cannot be matched by anything scripted.

I think that is what makes ⚽ such a globally popular sport. Spectacular goals can come out of nowhere, and they can literally make all the different in a match result. Many goals are unexpected events of great consequences, being both amazing athletic highlights and swinging the result of the match. In the multiple text groups I have with other people concurrently watching matches, I find many texts simply saying "wow." While basketball, football, baseball and hockey are great sports in so many ways, I find that ⚽ produces the most unexpected wow moments.

I use ⚽ because despite the advancements that humanity has made in 2021, we still cannot have one name for the most popular sport on earth. Though I'd like to rant against the international disdain of the word soccer, a word coined by English people themselves from a weird shortening of "association football", I'll just stick to emojis to avoid controversy. But to vocabulary conventions, nowhere have I found British English and American English more different than when it comes to sports discussions. Where an American sports commentator may talk about how "that speedy youngster has been got the fans of his team excited with his streak of great play", an English commentary might say "that youthful lad with great pace is exciting his side's supporters with his good form of late." An American writing about differences to European ⚽ is hardly novel. In fact, there is an entire TV series birthed from this premise, the amazing Ted Lasso show. One of the show's gimmicks is the coach who serves as a "translator."

Ted Lasso:  And today's lesson is "trick plays." What do they call 'em here again?

Coach: Elaborate set pieces.

Ted Lasso: Yeah we're going to stick with trick plays, that's a lot more fun.

Following ⚽ is not exactly new for me. The first World Cup I remember following was in 1998, and I've followed closely every World Cup and European Championship since 2010. This isn't even my first blog post about this topic. But while I did drag myself out of bed at 3am for a Champions League final or two while in Hong Kong, I hadn't really followed the sport outside of these special tournaments. I'd recognize Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldinho when they showed up at the World Cup, but I didn't really know what club they normally played for. I've nominally been a Liverpool fan for several years, because their owners also own the Boston Red Sox, but I hadn't ever watched their regular season games.

The pandemic changed that for me. First, the German Bundesliga was really the first sport to emerge from the suspension of all sports. The English Premier League (EPL) came back a couple weeks later. The games generally took place weekday afternoons and weekend mornings, times that the pandemic made much more accessible. 

Each American sport and professional league is unique of course, but their commonality is revealed when compared to non-American systems. For example, each league is divided into conferences and divisions, have a playoff system, a draft, and clocks that count down (except for baseball). Coming from this context, there is a lot about European ⚽ that can appear quite whacky.

Each country has its own league. Sorry, I meant leagues. Each country has a system of tiered leagues with relegation rules, where in each league, the best teams go up and the worst teams go down. It's a brilliant system that makes matches exciting through the end of the season and eliminates "tanking," a problem endemic in American sports. What's less brilliant is the naming system of the leagues of England (+ Wales + Isle of Man + Jersey + Guernsey but not Scotland or Northern Ireland). Here are the top 3 Leagues:

1. Premier League

2. The Championship (not to be confused with the Champion's League)

3. League One

The names are a confusing legacy of history that defies modern design, much like how hereditary peers still maintain a real role in Parliament. 

In addition, basic assumptions that we have about sports in America are violated while watching ⚽. In American sports, the clock counts down. In ⚽ , and rugby, it counts up. In basketball and football (and ultimate), out of bounds is determined by where your feet are when you contact the ball. In ⚽, it's where the ball is. In all American sports, teams in a league qualify for a playoff tournament, and the winner of that playoff is the real champion. In the Premier League, every team plays each other twice for a total of 38 matches, and that's it - whoever has the most points at the end is the league champion. This does ensure that all regular season matches are meaningful, and you don't have arguments about who the real best team is, but can also result in an anti-climactic situation like Liverpool celebrating its 2020 championship when Manchester City lost their match.

But ⚽ also has playoffs. For European men and women, the Champions League is this very cool international competition between clubs that's essentially a 32 team tournament that follows a format with some similarities to the World Cup formats - except it's actually a 79 team tournament that allows the best teams from countries like Israel, Azerbaijan and Iceland to compete to be the champions of Europe. Four leagues are extremely strong - the Premier League (England), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany), with the French and Dutch leagues also producing top teams. Elite players often bounce around amongst these leagues, resulting in some intriguing international combinations and multilingual talents. Each league has different automatic Champions League entries - the Premier League gets 4 (out of the 32). These are the top 4 league finishers. Also, the reigning Champion League winner automatically qualifies, even if they don't finish top 4. Confused?

What's especially confusing is how these seasons occur simultaneously. The regular season runs from fall to late spring, and takes breaks for Champions League matches - as well as international friendlies where national teams, not clubs, compete. The top 4 English teams in 2020-2021 get to compete in the 2021-2022 Champions League, but these top 4 are determined while the 2020-2021 Champions League runs. The next top 3 qualify for a lesser tournament called the Europa League. The roster that qualified for a Champions League tournament will not be the same that competes in it, and it's quite common for a star player to help a team qualify then transfer to a club that faces the former club in the Champions League. Even more confusing is ⚽'s structure to do "loans" where a player goes to another club to get playing time while still technically on another club's payroll. This results in a situation like FC Barcelona's Philippe Coutinho scoring 2 goals and 1 assist for Bayern Munich against Barcelona. Lastly it is very possible for a club to have a disappointing season in their normal league (their domestic league) but have a great tournament run and win the Champions League. Was that a great season then? Fans are mixed. In England, most supporters would prefer to win the Premier League, aka be champions of England, than win the Champions League, aka be champions of Europe. Maybe this sheds some light behind Brexit.

I haven't even mentioned the individual nation's cups. Yes in addition to the domestic leagues and the Champions League, each country also has a tournament open to all teams in their many divisions. In England this is called the FA Cup, in Germany the DFB-Pokal. These are tournaments steeped in tradition, where lower division clubs have had memorable upsets of top flight ones. But in modern times they can seem to be an odd break in the schedule where top flight clubs play their benchwarmers against semi-professionals on haphazard pitches. 

Oh and there are other tournaments thrown in there. English teams also compete in the Carabao Cup, which is similar to the FA Cup except that I have no idea why it exists. There are some complicated rules regarding an automatic berth to the Europa League or something stupid like that. And none of this has anything to do with the Euros, or the World Cup, or anything in any other continent.

Sports can become a big institution, and when institutions get big, they get complicated. I know how complicated and weird many non-Americans find baseball and 🏈. Learning more about  ⚽ has allowed me to connect to so many more people around the world. One taxi driver in Costa Rica spent our entire ride recounting every single Costa Rican World Cup appearance. While basketball has incredible broad global appeal, how many moments do all basketball fans share? I struggle to think of any basketball play that every fan remembers - meanwhile, easily over half the globe remembers Germany 7, Brazil 1.  Despite all their corruption and faults, big sports help connect humanity, and I'm forever grateful for that.