Marquette graduate students John Brenner and Mitch Romens and Mike Rhodes, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, waited patiently in the rain for Caffrey’s Pub to open Saturday morning.
While they waited, they shared “completely legal” Internet feeds they use to watch English Premier League football, a necessity for Americans looking to keep up with their European teams.
The bar has been opening at 9 a.m. on Saturdays this semester to accommodate football fans around Marquette, who used to have to migrate to the east side to find a decent soccer bar.
Bartender Ricky Stoll, a senior in the College of Communication, told me he came up with the idea after claustrophobic experiences at other soccer bars in the city. Pinned up like a sardine against the back wall of a bar doesn’t sound like a fun way to enjoy a football game.
Brenner, Romens and Rhodes acknowledge they look like raging alcoholics to passers-by who peer into the windows but, as the only place nearby that offers English Premier League games with Anglophone commentators and video that doesn’t cut in and out, it’s the only place they’d want to be on a Saturday morning.
And so I joined them this weekend looking to infiltrate the cult of Americans who follow English football.
In the United States we have a lot of leagues and sports to choose from. In England soccer is the end-all, be-all of sport, said Ryan Robb, a sophomore midfielder on Marquette’s men’s soccer team who hails from Ampthill, England.
“It’s every kid’s dream to win domestic league titles,” he said.
I know there’s no way for me to get the full experience of following English soccer, but I’ve watched my fair share of World Cup and MLS games, so at least I knew something about soccer going in. I was embarrassingly ignorant when it came to club-level soccer, though, so I decided to try and expand my horizons.
Robb and Brenner, who Stoll joked should spots at the bar reserved with a plaque, helped me out with essential background knowledge I needed before getting in to choosing a team, like what the difference is between transfers and loans and how amateur players become professional.
Finding a starting point when trying to figure out what team to support is tough. Much of sports fanhood is based on geography but that’s not as reliable when the closest team in the league is 3,700 miles away.
The next inclination is to pick a team that’s going to be successful. In the EPL there are four teams that historically dominate the league—Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal—but my choosing one of those teams would be equivalent to a French person coming into a Milwaukee bar, asking for escargots and a bottle of Perrier and declaring his allegiance to “ze New York Yan-KEES.”
If something like this is enough to make a reasonable person like me want to shove a wine glass down the French guy’s throat, I can only imagine what a crazy English person would do if I pulled a similar stunt.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is relegation. There’s nothing like it in American sports but, as I understand it, it would be like swapping last-place teams in Major League Baseball with top minor-league clubs.
As an American, it seems like it would be an embarrassing thing to go through as a fan, but Robb and Brenner said the main repercussion of relegation is financial, not reputational since the next tier of teams in England are still amongst the best club sides in Europe. Still, I couldn’t justify getting behind a team that might drop out of the league.
That left me with a group of teams in the middle whose spots in the league are secure, yet won’t get me labeled as a bandwagon-jumper if I start pulling for them; the best-known among them including Tottenham, Manchester City and Aston Villa.
Having it narrowed down to this group of teams allowed the next criteria to come into play: American players. And when it comes to American players in England, I had to look no farther than the goalie boxes.
Some of the best keepers in the EPL are American-born, including Wolverhampton’s Marcus Hahnemann, Villa’s Brad Friedel and Everton’s Tim Howard. I gravitated to Howard, who, as the starting keeper for U.S. Soccer in the World Cup, presumably is the best of the best. A 3-3 draw with powerhouse Manchester United made Everton’s pull on me even stronger, despite the fact Everton would be relegated if the league ended this week.
Keeping up with the Blues from across the pond won’t be easy, but I’m determined. I’ll be a weekly visitor to Everton’s team web site, the Premiership’s home page and ESPN’s soccer pages. But I think the best thing I could do is what any good journalist would do: follow up at Caffrey’s next Saturday morning. Inquisitive stares be damned.
