Monday, March 25, 2013

Eradicating Football Loyalists


I recognize the irony of featuring a player who plays in the BPL above this post, but it gets the message across and after his goal on Friday I'd say he's American enough for me.

I know I've neglected this blog for quite a while, and for that I apologize. Yesterday, however, I heard something so enraging that I had to hop on here to tell you all about it.
At our family dinner last night, my dad was telling us about some friends of the family who had recently taken a trip to London to see a match at Emirates Stadium and another at White Hart Lane. Needless to say, I was extremely jealous and pestering my dad with every question I thought he might be able to answer, eager to gobble up every little morsel of information I could so I could attempt to live vicariously through the stories I heard.
Eventually, attempting to change the subject a bit to keep me from bothering him, my dad recounted how he told our friend that I go to FC Dallas matches. To which his friend replied "Oh, he really should be following the Premiere League."
There was other stuff that happened, but at that line I simply went red. That sort of response indicates the lowest type of American soccer fan, a Loyalist. Someone who thinks soccer belongs to the fathers of the sport in England and the other hotspots of Europe. These people often fall into two subcategories. Elitists, who would prefer the "highest quality" soccer and find those with less grace and class to be inferior (you'll find a good number of Manchester United fans here). Or Soccer Hipsters, who don't want the sport to gain traction in America, as it will make their interest in it seem commonplace and mainstream (these people shrink back like a vampire from the sun at the word "mainstream").
One of the worst parts about this particular incident is that the accused lives in Dallas! A city which already contains an MLS team (and one, I'm happy to say, which is actually doing quite well right now)! What a soccer fan from Orlando or OKC or any number of other places around the country wouldn't give to have an MLS team right in their backyard.
As American soccer fans, one of our biggest goals should be attempting to spread the sport in any way we can (shootout to the Free Beer Movement for all its work in this regard). We need to be patriotic in our love of the game, and at the very least acknowledge the teams and players we have playing within our borders, because when it comes time for the pinnacle of every soccer fan's existence, the World Cup, I'd hate to see any American fan of the sport come out with anything even resembling "I'm cheering for England to win it all."
So any of you out there who come across these non-believers in the American game, show them the errors of their ways. American soccer may not be the prettiest version of the game, or the most graceful, but it's ours. In my book, any game that begins with "O say, can you see?" is the best game of all.

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