America's Biggest Stoke City Fan?
Sure, sure, great, but why Stoke City FC?
Let's talk about Stoke City Football Club–aka SCFC, Stoke, or Stoke City–my English team. The story of Stoke is, in short, an old team that has sometimes been good, but never truly been great. There are longer stories, there are even a few books about the team, and of course, Wikipedia.
But what about me, how did I end up following the team?
Well, if you don't know me well, you may not know that I'm from many places, one of them being Cleveland. I have no love for the Browns, and only a passing interest in the Cavs, but the Cleveland Guardians have a firm place in my heart as do the former, currently lost, but maybe soon-to-be-revived WNBA Cleveland Rockers. What you may not know is that Stoke City FC played a short time as the Cleveland Stokers in the United Soccer Association during 1967 and the North American Soccer League in 1968. So of course, how could I follow any other English team?
Unfortunately in truth, the Cleveland link with Stoke has nothing to do with my fandom. I literally only learned about it in the past year. It's a convenient story, but the real story is more embarrassing.
You see, in high school, I desperately wanted to be cool. Or, not cool-cool, exactly. I wanted to be alt-cool, if you will. That kind of cool that was a little ephemeral, a little mysterious. In case it needs confirming, I was neither cool-cool nor alt-cool. Most generously, I could be described as a mild nerd who mostly flew under the radar. Less generously, I was probably a pretty annoying know-it-all who tried too hard and only really got attention when I did something embarrassing that could not be ignored or unpunished by the other teens. But that doesn't mean I didn't try, really tirelessly try, to be the alt-cool type I so coveted.
In my sophomore and junior years of high school, I inexplicably started running with the evangelical christian group and there is a weird overlap in the evangelical-teen and soccer-teen in the US. I'm not sure if it has to do with missionary work, or maybe something to do with the origins of the sport. (There is a likely-apocryphal story that the sport as we know it today was created by a boarding school in England trying to encourage the boys to get more focused on their feet, so they'd somehow be discouraged from using their hands for acts of unholy self-love.)
Regardless, football was a big deal with the boys in this group and despite me trying to ignore my queerness and transness at the time, given the lack of overlap there with the evangelical group, I did still really want to be one of the boys. So, back to the story at hand: they all followed the English Premier League and I wanted to be in the in-crowd, so I needed to choose a team.
But remember, I wanted to be alt-cool.
So I couldn't choose one of the cool teams at the time, like Arsenal, or Manchester United. So I studied the league at the time and identified Stoke City, a top-of-the-Championship, soon-to-be-promoted side with a humble following and long history. Even back then, the wiki page was full enough for me to identify that this was a team that resonated with my sporting sensibilities, which is to say: teams without superstars who have sometimes been good, but never been great.
And so, that's how I became a Stoke City FC fan. Since then, it has had its ups and downs, but mostly downs. One of my possibly unfortunate sporting tendencies is that I hate a bandwagoner, and a fair-weather fan, so once I commit, I can not bail out. I will be a Stoke fan as long as I’m alive and they exist.
We had a solid decade of middling to mediocre performance in the Premier League before getting relegated back down to the Championship league in 2018. There, we had a few years of mild success, threatening the top of the table, but never really in contention to move back up. More recently, we've been fighting at the bottom of the table to avoid getting relegated to the third league in the pyramid, which is not at all confusingly named League One.
Now, remember how in my last missive, I noted that I didn't really get to watch much club football until 2021? Yeah, I followed Stoke City for 15 years before I got to watch a Stoke City match televised. For those 15 years, it’s more fair to say I followed the stats pages and wiki page, than the matches. I knew the players, and the results and I sometimes read blogs out of Stoke-on-Trent, but I never really knew what it was like to watch the team. Mine was a very peculiar fandom.
Then came the golden years, 2021 to 2024, where I could watch every match on ESPN. Such years are gone, with the broadcasting rights for all of the EFL (the Championship, plus League One and League Two) now owned by CBS/Paramount. For some reason, CBS sees fit to broadcast every single fucking Wrexham match in the US, but only about a quarter of the Stoke matches. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
So instead, I have the official Stoke City app and I pay £40 a season to listen to the radio broadcast. Stupid Ryan Reynolds and his stupid pretty face.
And that brings us to now: During my visit, I will get to attend three Stoke matches, two at home and one at Leeds. I don't love our chances for pulling off a win in all three, but I think I might get lucky with at least one win.
We've had a rough go of things this season. Three managers, some weaknesses in our roster, and more than anything, not finishing out matches. It feels like every match that we've dropped points (aka, a loss or a draw) has been due to a last minute goal from the other team, after 89 minutes of staunch and solid play. Or due to an unlucky call that, in the EPL, would go another way (where VAR is used). I could look it up, but just trust me, the feeling is true, even if the stats don’t back me up.
There's a really fair chance that I will have a perfectly Cleveland sports experience, to wit: three really disappointing matches. But I will be there, in the flesh, to feel all the disappointment with my fellow Stoke City fans, so you know what? I'll take it. The drama, the emotion, the fervor, that is why I love the sport after all, with the lows make the highs all the sweeter. Now if only Stoke could manage a couple of highs in the next two weeks...