What we learn about America from NBC’s English soccer buy

It crystallizes a number of trends and changes in U.S. sports culture and beyond. Soccer may not be challenging the NFL anytime soon — ESPN is still paying nearly 12 times as much for gridiron rights as NBC does for English soccer — but the game has become a permanent fixture on the U.S. sports scene, with a growing audience. NBC doesn’t yet make a profit from the EPL, but it certainly expects to do so.

Of course, skeptics and outright opponents of soccer in the Unites States remain. Conservative infotainment celebrity Ann Coulter managed to grab a few headlines during the 2014 World Cup by blasting the game as unmanly, un-American and incomprehensible. But such voices were drowned out by record TV audiences for the tournament: 26.5 million Americans watched the final game between Argentina and Germany, and 25 million watched Team USA win this year’s Women’s World Cup final.

The successes of the women’s national team and the men’s squad — which defied odds to get through the 2014 World Cup’s so-called group of death — are certainly part of the mix that explains soccer’s increasing popularity, but it has many other sources. The immense popularity of soccer as a youth sport (one of the great legacies of the ill-fated North American Soccer League of the 1970s) has expanded the TV audience for the game.

America’s changing demography has done the same. Not only has the Latino population grown, dominated by immigrants from countries where soccer is more popular than baseball, but also new waves of immigrants form Africa, Europe and Asia are bringing a taste for the game with them and no longer feel the nativist pressures to abandon it for “American” games.

In Lansing, Michigan, in 2014, I watched a series of five-a-side games in what was once an indoor baseball hall. Now it hosts teams made up of young white women from the local high school, blue-collar Latinos, recently arrived professionals (in this case, among others, a Lebanese restaurant owner and a German professor of philosophy) and average Joes whose counterparts a generation earlier would have been playing baseball.

All this suggests that despite the enduring myth of American exceptionalism, in the sporting world the U.S. is becoming more tolerant of its own diversity and less different from the rest of the world. But why is the EPL — rather than any other league, including America’s own Major League Soccer — so much more popular and lucrative, and what does that tell us about the country?

On that front, too, America appears little different form other soccer cultures outside Europe where the EPL reigns supreme. Across West Asia and the Middle East, all through Southeast Asia and everywhere in Africa, the EPL is more popular than any domestic or other foreign league. 

The international makeup of the playing force — fewer than one-third of the players in the EPL are English — pulls in audiences from dozens of countries that want to watch the best homegrown talent compete with the best from everywhere else. The global reach of spoken English eases translation and accessibility. And the much-criticized lack of competitive balance in the league is no different from in Spain (dominated by just two clubs) and the hegemony of Bayern Munich in Germany. In fact, in the EPL season that kicked off last weekend, at least three — and perhaps four clubs — appear to have a realistic chance of winning the title.

The single most important factor explaining the global appeal of the English game, though, may the quality of the spectacle — the pace and intensity of play, the spine-tingling roar and mass singing of tens of thousands of passionate fans who fill the stadiums at every match and demand end-to-end action.

It’s the sort of atmosphere for which many other leagues yearn, particularly in U.S. professional soccer. Last weekend, in what connoisseurs of the game would take as a tableau of mimicry of the “Fight Club” culture of European ultras, fans of the New York Red Bulls and New York City FC clashed in Newark before their game, throwing sandwich boards and curses at each other, singing a taunt straight from the hymn sheet of English football, “Who are you? Who are you?” Perhaps that was just a one-off, but America’s embrace of football culture in general and English football culture in particular grows ever tighter.