Rebecca Lowe, flanked by the Men In Blazers:
Michael Davies (left) and Roger Bennett
#LivingTheDream
August 17, 2013, 10 years ago: NBC begins broadcasting soccer games of England's Premier League in America. This leads to an explosion of fandom for the League, and the sport in general, in the U.S.
Let me tell you what the American media's coverage of soccer was like in America when I grew up, in the 1970s and '80s:
* If your metropolitan area had a team is the North American Soccer League, one of the local independent stations -- that is, not affiliated with 1 of the 3 major networks of the time, NBC, CBS or ABC -- might broadcast their games, but probably handle them the same way they handled the NBA and the NHL: Broadcasting them on tape delay instead of live, and often at 11:30 at night.
* Every year, ABC Wide World of Sports would broadcast England's FA Cup Final, and the European Cup Final (the tournament now known as the UEFA Champions League) -- also on tape delay. (The FA Cup Final having been played earlier in the day, Saturday, but the European Cup Final having been played the preceding Wednesday.) And, when the World Cup or the European championships were held, ABC would broadcast a highlight show, followed by the Final, which, if the time zone worked out right, could be live.
* Magazines like Sports Illustrated and Time might have mentions of major results, days after the fact.
* If you found a newsstand that sold out-of-town and foreign periodicals, you could get a British newspaper on a 2-or-3-day delay, and get the results of Saturday's games on Monday or Tuesday.
* But the only way you could get a broadcast of a Football League Division One game, or a game in a European league, was through "ham radio": Find a fellow fan of said team, in the city in question, and have him put his ham radio microphone next to his regular radio's speaker.
And that was about it. At the dawn of the 21st Century, the growth of cable and satellite TV allowed bars in cities with expatriate populations, including New York, to broadcast the games live. Other than that, if you were a fan of a particular team in England, or elsewhere in Europe, and you wanted to watch them, you had to pay through the nose to your cable company to get the games yourselves, or go to one of those bars, or else you were out of luck, Jack.
By the time I began to get interested in Europeans soccer, following the 2006 World Cup, the tide had begun to turn. American cable systems began to get British networks like Sky Sports, Ireland's Setanta Sports, and Qatar-based beIN Sports, which broadcast games from France, Spain and Italy.
And so, fans like me would go to places like Nevada Smith's (R.I.P.) in New York's East Village, the Phoenix Landing in Cambridge outside Boston, the Globe Tavern in Chicago, the Fox and Hound in Los Angeles, the Mad Dog in the Fog in San Francisco, and various outlets of the Fadó chain (most of them now gone, though the ones in Philadelphia and Atlanta remain open). We would get out of bed early to catch a 10:00 AM start, because of the 5-hour time difference between New York and London. And if you were on the Pacific Coast, well, one of the earliest U.S.-based Arsenal blogs came out of Seattle, and was titled 7AM Kickoff.
At first, the vast majority of Americans watching were fans of one of the teams then comprising the "Big Four": In descending order, Manchester United, Liverpool, West London team Chelsea, and North London team Arsenal. This was because they were the most successful at the time, and thus the most shown on TV, just as NFL fans of the 1970s became fans of Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami and the Whatever City They're In Now Raiders, because they were on TV and winning when their local team might not have been.
There were a few fans who had been indoctrinated into watching other teams, usually by expats they'd met at such bars. But if you were a fan of Man United's neighbors Manchester City, Liverpool's neighbors Everton, Arsenal's neighbors Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United, or another Premier League team, perhaps Birmingham's Aston Villa or Newcastle United, you were part of a special breed indeed, who got in on the ground floor of this phenomenon, before the explosion of watching possibilities.
Finally, NBC decided to strike while the iron was hot, and allowed its various sub-networks to broadcast the games. As with American football, they had a studio show to do pregame, halftime and postgame analysis.
Unusually, it was hosted by a woman, Rebecca Lowe, a West London native who had attended the private Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania for a time, and was familiar with American culture; and included American goalie Tim Howard, and "The Two Robbies," former Middlesbrough midfielder Robin Mustoe and former Wimbledon FC midfielder Robbie Earle.
The games themselves were usually broadcast by names familiar to English audiences, such as Martin Tyler, Peter Drury and Arlo White, with color commentary by former players like Arsenal's Lee Dixon and Chelsea's Graeme Le Saux.
They would have postgame wrapup shows like Premier League Goal Zone. For a while, timing it just right as the Emirati sheiks had bought Man City and poured enough money into the team to start winning trophies, they had Manchester Monday, showing highlights of both Manc teams. (There was no corresponding show for the London teams, of which there were too many; or the Birmingham teams, Aston Villa and Birmingham City; or the Merseyside teams, Liverpool and Everton; or the North-East teams, Newcastle United, Sunderland and Middlesbrough.)
And then, starting in 2014, came Men In Blazers. This was an extension of a podcast done by Michael Davies (and that's pronounced DAY-viss, as if there were no E in there, not DAY-veez), from Southeast London, who abandoned his local team Crystal Palace to support Chelsea; and Roger Bennett, from Liverpool, and an Everton fan. "Davo," who got his start as a TV producer, is the straight man; "Rog," who spent a Summer in Chicago as a teenager, and went back to America as soon as he could and has embraced our country so much he titled his memoir Reborn In the U.S.A., is the funny one.
(Reborn In the U.S.A. is a terrific book, showing just how stark a Liverpool boyhood in the 1970s and '80s, especially for a Jewish kid in a largely Irish-Catholic city, could be. Rog really found himself in America. The weird thing about the book is that he hardly mentions soccer at all, talking more about his love of Chicago's Bears, White Sox and Blackhawks -- but not the Bulls, as Michael Jordan was just getting started.)
Davo and Rog show highlights, make pithy comments, and do interviews with soccer personalities and American celebrities who happen to love one PL team or another. Davo usually doesn't taunt Rog over Chelsea's success and/or Everton's misery. But let the record show that, in 2022 and 2023, Rog celebrated Everton's avoidance of relegation more than Davo has celebrated any of Chelsea's achievements.
Through NBC's coverage, it is no longer unusual to see Americans wearing English team shirts, caps, scarves, jackets, and so on. And as Man City and Leicester City have won League titles and stayed in the League's elite (until Leicester just got relegated in 2023), and Tottenham have improved, while the former Big Four teams have each had bad years (though each of them, except Man United, have since improved), being an American and a fan of a team not in the former Big Four, while still unusual, is no longer a big deal.
NBC has done what previous TV networks, Pelé, David Beckham, and even the U.S. team's performances in the 1994, 2002 and 2010 World Cups couldn't do: It has made Americans embrace soccer, the world's game -- as Pelé put it, "the beautiful game."
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