Not long after I moved to New York I went out to a park on the East River. It was a Saturday in springtime, the bars were overflowing with hungover people working on their next hangover and the playing fields were full of twenty-somethings in matching T-shirts, playing Kickball — a game like rounders but played with a large rubber ball and one’s feet.
I found the footballers gathering on a scrabbly plastic pitch around a young Trinidadian immigrant named Dale Choonoolal, who gave a speech about building communities in a transient city and about how football could bring people together.
It was unlike anything I’d seen before. Back in London, I’d played for an eleven-a-side team on Hackney Marshes and at the fields by Wormwood Scrubs. There were speeches but they were strictly about the need to keep it tight and stop fannying about in the midfield.
Here in the park by the East River, the crowd was full of earnest converts to the game, who spoke of it as if it was an exotic new craze, like rock climbing or trampolining. “I really want to get in to soccer,” they’d say. Afterwards we headed to a wine bar in the East Village for brunch. “Are you with the athletes?” a hostess asked, when I arrived, feeling awkward because I was still in my kit. The athletes were downstairs, drinking mimosas. You didn’t get this at Hackney Marshes.
I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but we were on the cusp of something: the beginning of a quiet revolution in which football would finally gain a foothold in American culture. The previous summer, the sports channel ESPN had devoted what was by American standards an extraordinary new level of coverage to the 2010 World Cup, recruiting experienced British commentators such as Martin Tyler and Ian Darke and sending a team to South Africa that was even larger than the BBC’s. Many American soccer fans still point to a single moment from that tournament that helped convert them into devotees, when Landon Donovan scored against Algeria in the 90th minute of a group game, and Darke, suddenly unable to contain himself, shouted “Go! Go! USA!”
ESPN had also bought the rights to the Premier League and began showing games at weekends. Thanks to the time difference, these slotted easily into their schedule, before the day’s American football, baseball or basketball games. Darke, partnered with Steve McManaman, became a fixture of Saturday and Sunday morning television for a legion of new football fans. “It’s an excuse to wake up early and start drinking,” 26-year-old Zac Pacles from Las Vegas, who now counts himself a Liverpool fan, said.
In 2012 the broadcaster NBC bought the rights, and Darke too, and more than doubled the audience, according to Pierre Maes, a sports rights and media consultant based in Brussels. Football has grown “to be the fourth sport [in the US] in terms of popularity,” he said, behind American football, basketball and baseball, but ahead of ice hockey. Late last year it struck a new deal with the Premier League, at nearly double the previous price, agreeing to pay $2.7 billion (about £2.05 billion) over six years, or about $450 million (£341.2 million) a season.
“Soccer in the US, on TV, has exploded,” Victor Matheson, a professor of sports economics at the College of Holy Cross in Massachusetts, said. “You can watch any game in the world, any time you want.” Matheson, who is 52 and hails originally from Colorado, counts himself as part of the first American-born generation to play the game. “Growing up in the 1970s, the only soccer you could get on television was a show on PBS, of all things, called Soccer Made In Germany,” he said. PBS is America’s high-minded Public Broadcasting Service, that airs current affairs, period dramas and educational children’s shows like Sesame Street. Viewers were treated to one game per week, though not an entire game: the show only lasted sixty minutes and “it included a ten-to-fifteen minute segment in the middle, talking about some aspect of German culture,” Matheson said. It would cut away from a Bayern Munich home game to a segment on cuckoo clocks, or Oktoberfest, he said.
By the following decade, it was possible to catch Mexican teams on Spanish language television. “I watched my first two World Cups, 1982 and 1986, in Spanish,” Matheson said. “I don’t speak Spanish, but I could follow along. You couldn’t watch it any other way.”
The 1994 World Cup, in the US, then showed the potential market for the game in a nation full of sports fans with far more large stadiums than any other country. It still holds the record for the highest attendance of any World Cup in history. “Even if only twenty per cent of the population are soccer fans, that is as many people as the entire UK, right?” Matheson said.
And if the US men’s team was still nothing to write home about, the women’s team was emerging as a world beater, fed not by clubs but by well-funded programmes at American universities, the result of a 1972 law that obliged colleges to devote equal resources to women’s sports. In the top tier of college athletics, the number of women’s soccer programmes more than trebled from around a hundred in the 1980s to 350 in the early 2000s. By 1999, America had a women’s team full of players who were “very charismatic and wildly talented,” Matheson said. He was living in Chicago near the Wrigley Field baseball stadium at the time and recalls going into a sports bar and asking if they could tune one of their televisions to a World Cup game. “Everyone looked at me,” he said. “But the next time the US was playing there were other people watching too. But the third time everyone was watching.” He was in a biker bar in Missouri for their semi-final match. “The bikers were asking to turn on the World Cup,” he said.
Allison Maresca was nine when that team won the World Cup in 1999 and she remembers the effect it had in her corner of New Jersey. “Women’s soccer was really picking up,” she said. It seemed to her the most popular and accessible of all women’s sports, “the first to pick up nationally.” Her older sister played for one of the top teams in the country. “It consumed her life,” she said. “She played with girls in the national team.”
Maresca played for her school, with her sister’s club and then for Brandeis University. I met her in New York, on a team called the Rangers where she was a more or less impassable right back. Occasionally a friend of hers would play for us upfront: once, on a large pitch out in Brooklyn, I watched this woman score an extraordinary break-away goal, picking it up from deep in our half and outpacing three or four men. She was like Arjen Robben: she used the space, they couldn’t catch her. This was one of the delights of amateur soccer in New York: watching immigrants, particularly Europeans and South Americans, coming up against female players for the first time. None of us were used to it. “I remember the first time,” a Frenchman told me, a big, skillful central midfielder. “I said: ‘Okay, I will go very easy on her.’” He said it rather loudly, his opposite number heard. “Oh man,” he said. “She took me out.”
We were playing in a league run by Dale Choonoolal, the Trinidadian-American who organised that weekend game on the East River in the spring of 2010. Choonoolal had started organising soccer gatherings in 2007 after he got a job in finance and struggled to find a game in the city. He started one in a park in Queens, until the parks department barred them, complaining that they were spoiling the grass. Choonoolal, 42, began negotiating for a permit somewhere else. They were hard to get, apparently. “You are competing with so many different sports,” he said. On one of the fields where we played, half the pitch seemed to be set aside for Quidditch. But Choonoolal steadily secured more permits and in the years after 2010, his get-togethers grew larger. In 2012 he began starting soccer leagues and quit his day job as a trader. About eight thousand players now compete in leagues run by his company, NYC Soccer, and rivals have sprung up too. “These days everyone wants to start a soccer league,” he said. He thinks the city should build more fields. “Baseball — I wouldn’t say it’s a dying sport,” he said. “But there are a lot more kids playing soccer than baseball.”
I coach a boys’ team on a Saturday now: a lot of the parents are keen because they see it as a way for their progeny to win a college scholarship without risking brain damage with a high school American football team. It’s not quite as popular as baseball, more broadly speaking, according to a recent survey by the British firm Ampere Analysis. Forty-nine per cent of those surveyed said they liked watching soccer on TV, compared with 57 per cent for baseball, 61 per cent for basketball, and 70 per cent for American football. Still, it was above ice hockey. Jack Genovese, research manager at the firm, said the enormous new deal for Premier League games was based partly on the belief that the 2026 World Cup, in Mexico, the US and Canada, will spur even greater interest.
It’s been strange, as an Englishman in New York: you keep running into American fans of Tottenham Hotspur or Chelsea. At first it was just hipsters and bookish types. Interviewing the author Malcolm Gladwell in 2016, he started talking about Arsenal. In his recent bestseller, The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green says he was delighted to hear a fellow novelist explain, to an interviewer who wanted to know if he was a writer or a YouTuber, that “John thinks of himself mainly as a Liverpool fan”.
Now I hear about it while picking up the kids from school. “It took me a little bit to get into it,” Phil Mastil, 46, the father of one of my son’s friends, told me the other day. “The commentators talk very differently from American football commentators. They use the word ‘lovely’. ‘That was a lovely pass.’” But after a while he got past this. He considered becoming an Arsenal fan. “I thought: ‘No’ I just don’t like this team,” he said. He decided on Tottenham. In 2016 he took a trip to London, to visit a friend, and went to a game at White Hart Lane, marveling at how old and cramped the place seemed, in comparison to an American stadium. He was astonished by the lavatories. He went to Britain again in 2018 for a long weekend. “My wife said: ‘Did I go to see the sights?’” he said. “I was like, ‘Well, not really.’” He had seen the Fulham home ground and Spurs at Wembley.
Value of Premier League TV rights surges in the US
By Martyn Ziegler
No other country in the world has experienced the surge in money paid for Premier League TV rights than the United States and from next season it will be the single most valuable overseas territory for England’s top flight.
NBC has paid £2.05 billion (about $2.7 billion) for six seasons from 2022-28, £342 million a year, holding on to the rights in the face of considerable competition.
That is a five-fold increase on the sum it paid ten years previously and around 20 times the value of the rights when Fox Sports had them 20 years ago.
The competition for the Premier League in Canada has been fierce too and the streaming service FuboTV captured the rights for all 380 games a season from 2022-25 after beating DAZN in an auction, though the sum paid has not been disclosed.
The timing of the Premier League matches is attractive for broadcasters in North America because kick-offs do not usually clash with the big American football, basketball and baseball games.
Peter Moore, the former Liverpool chief executive who returned to work in California last year, says: “From the perspective of a West Coast American getting up at 4am and being able to watch three matches before lunchtime, I think NBC Sports has done a phenomenal job in promoting the Premier League.
“NBC Sports have made the Premier League must-watch TV on Saturday morning for just about every American family. In the last ten years everybody in the US understood the game, thoroughly enjoyed watching it and got themselves a team.”
