The WC brought the game home, showed Americans top flight play on color tv, live, at a reasonable hour, on free OTA tv. It was an event, and kids my age (teens) had already gotten the taste as younger kids.

This enabled the MLS to launch in out of the ashes of the NASL. Now, a dad can take his son's or daughters to see a game, in what I will admit is an environment crafted for safe viewing, and not, say, Millwall (first game I attended over there).

Next up, the Spice Girls and David Beckham. Teenage girls knowing who "Becks" plays for in the late 90's was wild. Maybe it was different in CT, cause we had a bit more worldwide exposure to stuff, but it was also on MTV.

I personally started following closely when I was bartending in Sydney. I worked a 10p-6a shift, and we had Foxtel, which showed 4 games every Sunday, live. We had big projector TVs and a crowd of rowdy English ex-pats rolling in at 1am to watch live, in their business suits (actual suits).

My best friend there was an avid Gooner, so I watched "the red team" keenly. They seemed to be having fun. They also never lost (03-04).

Finding games back home was tough, but happening upon them was always a treat.

It's reached a point where, in the sports dead season (late NGL/NBA, early baseball), the UCLA knockouts are by far the best weekend sports products available. Ronaldo and Bale doing work for Real, that had bars rocking in NYC.

Once soccer found the money (educated Americans), they are not looking back.

world pro soccer discussion on Clark's Pitch. More than a few boards on NDN don't have this level of engagement. It is a phenomenon that has been growing over time. I am not yet part of it but one can see its becoming more main stream.

and I can understand why one would not, give it a shot for their extensive soccer coverage. Reading about the myriad issues in the different leagues and clubs will give you plenty of foundational knowledge.

MLS clubs are forming formal ties with clubs in Europe, giving the clubs in Europe right of refusal purchase options on players moving from MLS to Europe, and sharing scouting and other program-level components in return. Some of these are official, direct ties (like NYCFC and Manchester City, or the Red Bull clubs), others are relationships that were made more formal while not being a direct ownership relationship (Bayern Munich and FC Dallas is a good example).

It's a trend here in the US and it's probably a good thing in the long run, except for Red Bull. Nobody likes them.

We specificaly talked about the most hated club in Germany, and it is Bayern Bayern Bayern

I would expect that answer. However, across Germany with regards to dedicated supporters, you'll find a consistent hate level for the cans. They are very protective of their footballing culture.

Before 2013, there was not any one single platform that dedicatedly showed all the games on a regularly, available schedule. Sure FOX Soccer showed a ton of games, but that was a difficult channel to purchase/find. ESPN had games, but you couldn't trust it to show YOUR match. When NBC took over, every bar/home in America could become a Soccer Pub.

This coincided with the fact Manchester City had just won the league for the first time since the 60s and the winning continued (at least domestically, hahaha) and so the US fans flocked to the blue side of Manchester. But the old ManU and Liverpool fans remain as those are the two most popular EPL teams globally as well.
I propose that if NBC would have started showing the games 1 decade sooner, Chelsea would have swapped places with ManCity as that would have coincided with the highest-highs for Chelsea. It just comes down to timing of their sucess for the City fans popularity in USA. Before their title, I had met more USA Spurs fans than ManCity (which was like 2 fans at the time lol)

One of the problems the other leagues are finding with the US market, is that we have grown out of simply SuperBowl-type interest. So when ESPN, or whoever owns rights, only wants to allocate enough airtime for El Clasico and not all the Spanish games, the growth is stymied here in the USA.

Some of this is active positioning from the EPL, but honestly, the leagues deserve some of the blame. Pick any two English clubs and that matchup will likely be more attractive than any 2 teams from Spain, France or Italy. The English have created a well-valued league top to bottom, and that is why it gets the complete coverage and why it is growing in USA.


Raoul, as for picking a team, pick wisely as it is permanent = ) Choose a club for you, not just because one team or another won the league last year.
Each club has its personalities and the fan-bases respond to their wins or losses differently. If there is a local pub near you that supports a squad, try them out. Having others fans to watch the game with is really fun and Detroit is likely to have good clubs.
Clearly if you like Detroit, you are OK with not winning, so this really opens up your choices.
Lastly, Ted Lasso is a bit correct when he says West Ham reminds him of pickup-trucks. So if you own a pickup-truck, why not be a Hammers fan...

To be succinct: NBC's investment into the English Premier League made the sport (and specifically the EPL) accessible to the US and has been instrumental in its growth. Man U hasn't been particularly good during this time, but there are plenty of folks still around that jumped on the Beckham, Ronaldo, etc. bandwagon back in the day.

Personally, I picked Liverpool back in the day because I felt it was the most like Notre Dame. It was harder to follow EPL, so I needed to pick a team that I felt would be on TV. But also one rich with history but struggling to hang on to that tradition. But that was me.

You might watch Sunderland Til I Die. It really does a great job teaching about the culture of English football. But be careful, it might cause you to root for a club that may never make it back to the Premier League!

Far be it from me to tell you who to root for. But I recommend Leeds. They have a rich history, but nobody would accuse you for being a bandwagon fan. But they probably have the brightest young USA star in Tyler Adams (tough kid and great leader) along with the blue collar kid in Brendon Aaronson. They also have a USA coach in Jesse Marsch. They are also one of Manchester United's rivals. It's fun to have a club (and supporters) to hate.

Fullham is a bit similar with history and USA presence. Tim Ream is the elder statesman team leader at 35 y/o along with the young Antonee Robinson. Chelsea are rivals, and Chelsea are dumb too. So there's that. ;-)

Last warning/caveat. There's tons of movement of players and managers. So you can certainly fall in love with a team like Leeds because of a Tyler Adams. But it won't be long before one of the bigger clubs snatch him up. It's inevitable. There's a strange acceptance in European soccer re the hierarchy of clubs. In US terms it's like the A's waiting for the Yankees or Dodgers to take their young stars...but in Europe/England there's almost a pride when a young star get's the opportunity to move on to a bigger club.

Enjoy the rabbit hole.

Until the Qatari purchase, I'm not sure I had ever met a Manchester City fan.

It's not entirely surprising that American fans would flock to the more successful clubs in the league.

Before Klopp's glory years, I used to say that Liverpool was the perfect team for a Notre Dame fan to cheer for. Formerly the most storied club in the league, futilely and tragically chasing lost glory. I would say a part of me misses the romance of that era, but we might be headed back there again!

Liverpool isn't much like Notre Dame at all.

Notre Dame fans don't typically get gassed outside stadiums, attack opposing teams busses, or hit a little girl in the head with a bottle filled with coins.

You want to draw parallels between Liverpool and Notre Dame becasue you are a Liverpool fan.

about a team you've been a fan of for ten minutes.

There are a few others, but that was part of the charm before Klopp came along.

For the original poster's question, the first soccer shirt in the house was an AC Milan shirt someone picked up at the airport in Rome, but the first soccer posters were two (2!) posters of Fernando Torres that one of the girls brought into the house when he was with Liverpool. Her younger brother glommed onto ManU at the end of their glory days. I don't know how B22 picked up Arsenal.

First and foremost, EPL is the most popular league worldwide, which also happens to be Americans choice due to that fact that it’s English, and the most watched and broadcasted in the US (prior to early 2000s I think you could only get matches on satellite/ choice bars; don’t remember anything on cable).

As for the most popular teams, Man Utd and Liverpool, it’s mostly a byproduct of being the winningest clubs in the history of the EPL. Manchester City and Chelsea’s resurgence goes back 10 and 15 years, respectively, and the most popular choice with the nouveau fan (as far as EPL is concerned that is; the biggest club in the world and the standard for the winningest European giant is Real Madrid in Spain, but you can also make a case for Bayern Munich in Germany and to a lesser extent some Italians beasts that longer sustain that status such as AC Milan and Inter Milan).

Anyway, fans who followed EPL longer than the last 10-15 years know Manchester United and Liverpool are the winningest, most tradition-rich clubs in England, followed by Arsenal, and to a much lesser extent Aston Villa, Everton and Newcastle.

have two European Championships between them!

Being able to watch the Champions League games at lunchtime on Tuesday Wednesday Thursday was a lot of fun for cube field workers. And those teams were Arsenal, United and Chelsea for the working age population of people brought up on soccer as kids in the 1970s and 1980s.

If you lived in New York, the British expats would be watching games at the bars in the afternoon on Saturday, probably just an hour or two before the NFL or college football. So that was a lot of fun. I don’t think the Spanish or Italian league had quite the same pull as a going out to the bars experience (though my dad’s best friend was a Kaiserslautern fan, and a kid on my soccer teams was from a family of Juventus fans).

At its height, the Guardiola - Mourinho battles at Barcelona and Madrid were must see TV. My favorite was the 5-0 or 5-1 shellacking with all the cules chanting ole with every pass. But at that time, no other fixture in La Liga burned quite so bright. Athletico didn’t become fun until just after that. The Premier league had three or four fun managers simultaneously throughout Ferguson, Toad, Wenger, Mourinho followed by Klopp and Guardiola.

But I don’t think you should pick any of those teams. Watch the documentaries on Prime about Leeds, Sunderland, Wrexham, QPR…there are lots of fun teams. Watch Green Street Hooligans and fall for West Ham or Milwall. Watch Fever Pitch and fall for Arsenal if you must. Personally, I think Aston Villa is the bees knees. Newcastle and Bolton have a Detroit Lions feel (probably Bolton moreso) and if you want to follow a long rebuild, Portsmouth.

has given it a significant advantage over the other European leagues.

The Premier League US television contract pay out is now 7 billion a year while La Liga is getting 2 billion from US tv. This is creating a dynamic where the Premier League is taking a larger share of the top players making it harder for the other leagues like La Liga to compete.

Leagues. That US TV money can impact their competitive balance.

Do the EPL, Liga and Bundesliga play each other? Have an annual super bowl like AFL and NFL?

Which is the best competition for club football on the planet. And it generates hundreds of millions of euros for clubs, billions in revneue yearly.

And yeah, only the 'big' clubs really compete for that title. Lots of English clubs, but there are other big clubs that play (typically) a huge role as well - from Spain, England, Italy, France. But these other leagues are hurting overall with finances with the exception of those big clubs. And even some of those are in trouble (see: Juventus in Italy). Bayern, in Germany, is an outlier because they're incredibly stable financially and very well off.

The longer this goes on, the more the talent will stockpile in England. It's problematic.

so you ought to stick with the blue and pick City.

You got a heavy dose of United and Arsenal, and in the early 2000s you'd see a lot of Chelsea and Liverpool as well. So yeah, TV coverage along with the language drove the interest here. It was easy to turn on FOX Sports (or FOX Soccer back then, too) and see a United match on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

With the advances in internet streaming, though, other leagues gained a lot of popularity here as well, particularly La Liga and the Bundesliga.

Scottish Premier League, Bundesliga, and Dutch Eridivisie. It was a glorious time to be a soccer fan in the US. Now, not so much...