When I was growing up in Manchester — Northern England, rather than New England — soccer was a religion. Except its adherents were generally more devout. We called it football, of course, and we were either United or City. I was the former but lived so close to City’s Maine Road stadium I could keep track of the score by listening to the sound of the crowd.
My enthusiasm was so extreme that I spent many Friday evenings watching Stockport County, then languishing in the 4th Division. I played, too, and when I was dropped from the school team, I would turn up, uninvited, to be a substitute. Nearly everything was won by Liverpool, which was hated with a passion by United and City fans alike, but there was always the next season.
This was the late 1970s and early 1980s, and hooliganism was a contagion. I was kicked in the face by a Sheffield United fan and punched by a City thug who stole my United scarf. We paid on the day to stand on the terraces. When United scored at Old Trafford, the crowd in the Stretford End would erupt, sometimes carrying me tens of yards away. Old men would urinate in the stands.
The Bradford City, Heysel, and Hillsborough disasters transformed everything. Soon, there were all-seater stadiums and club memberships. At the same time, money started to pour in, meaning rock-star wages and foreign players. Suddenly, United fans seemed to come from anywhere but Manchester, and players were more likely to have been bought from Barcelona or Inter Milan than to have made their way up through the youth scheme.
There was no chance of a modern version of the Busby Babes, the young, largely homegrown United team that saw eight players perish in the Munich air disaster in 1958. It seemed so soulless and, to a callow English youth, American.
After I left home at 18, I drifted away from watching. I had fallen out of love with the game. One of my fondest childhood memories had been my father, who was not a fan, taking me to watch United play FC Porto in the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1977. It was a thrilling 5-2 win but, alas, a defeat on aggregate. In goal was Alex Stepney, who had played in the 1968 European Cup along with Bobby Charlton, a Munich survivor. Already, I was nostalgic. The glory days of English football seemed to be in the past.
For more than 30 years, I was a lapsed fan. Then came the 2018 World Cup, and my 10-year-old son got the bug. Already a handy player on the local travel team, he was inspired by Harry Kane and decided that Tottenham Hotspur was his club.
Soon, we were going to D.C. United to watch Wayne Rooney, once of that other United, score a hat trick and then, in another game, get sent off. We saw premier league games on NBC, FA Cup games on ESPN, and discovered a local Spurs fan group that gathers at an Irish pub in Washington. We began discussing the merits of 4-4-2 versus 4-3-3, as well as the vagaries of video replay. Together, we read a favorite book of my youth, Brian Glanville’s 1971 classic, Goalkeepers are Different.
A world that had been lost to me opened up again. In the intervening years, there had been an explosion of interest in English soccer in the United States. Now, English sides are international, and so is the game. Until 1978, players had to have lived in the United Kingdom for two years before joining an English side — a de facto ban on foreigners. Commercially, the U.S. played a big part in taking soccer global. I had filtered out the seeds of this. Even when I was a boy, the likes of Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, and Johann Cruyff were lured to the North American Soccer League. The other day, I talked to a father of one of my son’s teammates, and it turned out that he had been trained in the U.S. by Dennis Viollet, one of the surviving Busby Babes.
Having become a naturalized American a decade ago, what I saw as the Americanization of English soccer now seems less of a negative. It is pleasant to watch a game without risk of being assaulted or of my son hearing vile abuse and racist chants. Looking at my old 1976-77 football card album, I’m stunned to see there was not a single black player in the old First Division that season. The game is much more skillful. Hatchet men such as United’s Nobby Stiles or Norman “Bites Yer Legs” Hunter of Leeds could never make it now.
Like me at his age, my son’s love for watching and playing the game is boundless, a connection spanning three decades and half the world.
Despite all the changes, I do experience deja vu. I had strong feelings about my son spending much of the first half of this season on the subs’ bench. And this year’s runaway leaders at the halfway point of the Premier League season, 30 years after they last won a league title? Yes, Liverpool.
