Sure, but why football?
Do I love football for a lot of reasons? Or do I love it because it was cool in high school?
Two editorial note:
First, I’m using the simple plain text version of Buttondown for my newsletter. Because I try to be a good steward of Buttondown, I want to mention it to note that you can make much prettier emails with them. I choose not to because I like it being just the words. But if you’re considering doing a newsletter, as always, I urge you to not use Substack. Buttondown is what I use, but there are other options!
Second, someone shared with me that the footnote feature in the plain text version is not consistently functional, so I’m resisting adding all of my footnote asides. Yes, it is painful. No, I am not a David Foster Wallace stan, it’s just how my brain works.
For reference, here are the teams I support:
Spain National Team (men’s and women’s)
US Women’s National Team, kind of, for proximity sake
Stoke City in England (Championship League)
Rayo Vallecano in Spain (La Liga)
St. Pauli in Germany (Bundesliga)
Columbus Crew in MLS
Boston Legacy FC in NWSL starting 2026 (one article about the botched team name roll-out called me a "prominent supporter" but I’m linking to a different, un-gated one that also quotes me, prominent supporter of Boston Legacy FC)
There are other teams that I like, but these are the teams that hold top priority. If Spain women’s selection plays the US women’s selection, Spain holds my loyalties.
So what is it with me and football? Why do I love it so much? Short answer: I don't know. But let me see what I can come up with.
First, let's talk about my history with the sport.
As far as actually playing the game, I have probably played football five times outside of gym class. I once did a soccer camp when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10 years old. What I remember is that my mom sent me there with a giant thermos of water that was not enough, it was hot, there was so much running, and my cleats were uncomfortable.
At a different summer camp, I injured a finger while playing keeper, trying to block a shot by a counselor who I later learned was a semi-pro player in Argentina during the rest of the year.
But the playing memory that I most love is from age 9: the first time I went to Spain with my family, I saw a group of kids playing and joined in. My Spanish was okay, probably better than you might expect thanks to my Madrileña mother’s teaching. I was free of the anxious overthinking when speaking Spanish that I later developed, but not fluent by any means. The other kids meanwhile didn't speak any English. But it didn't matter. What mattered was the play.
Which brings us to the first thing I love about football. At its core it is simple and universal. One ball, two spots marked for a goal, and maybe, if you are fancy, boundary markers. You can use trees, or soda cans, or bundled up sweatshirts, or you can use nothing at all, other than the ball and your feet.
It's a sport played around the world. Certainly some places hold it in higher regard, some countries hold it tantamount to religion while others have national teams that are better suited for a sports comedy than an underdog sports drama. But everyone knows of football. There are tactics and positions, complicated minutiae in the rules, sure. You can learn about football every day of your life and constantly be finding a new layer to explore, but at the foundation, it is simple. It’s in the name: foot meet ball, now play.
What about watching the sport? I remember watching the Women's World Cup in 1999. The final, going into extra time, then penalty kicks. Brandi Chastain whipping off her shirt, back when you could do that without picking up a yellow card. I also remember it was the first time I'd ever seen women playing sport on TV. And the first time that I could recall my mother letting us leave the TV on during dinner. Maybe the only time, actually. Because the game had run so long, even though it was an early kickoff relatively speaking, dinner was ready, but the US women weren't done and we were allowed to watch the match to its conclusion.
I remember the 2010 Men's World Cup. I was in rough shape, in the early recovery stages of a particularly harrowing mental health crisis, living with my parents, and pretty sure my life as I knew it was over. My mother, meanwhile, was on her own journey of recovery, at the tail end of her chemo treatments. I had watched every match I could while working at Borders (RIP), but I was scheduled to work on the day of the final match. I wore my Spain jersey under my uniform, set the game to record, and miraculously avoided spoilers. When I got home, my mom and I watched together and, when the winning goal went in, in added extra time, my mom and I both danced and shouted with joy. Spain were finally world champs.
The 2014 Men’s World Cup I watched between classes, Spain painfully crashing out in the group stage. The 2018 Men’s World Cup I listened to in the car while my dad and I drove from Cleveland to Oakland with my dog and most beloved plants in the back seat. Spain again underperformed, but Croatia, another national team I like, made it to the finals, which I watched in a pizzeria in Alameda, while searching Craigslist for an apartment to house me through my grad program.
The 2019 Women’s World Cup, I watched in a different pizza shop in Oakland. When Ohio's own Rose Lavelle scored her iconic goal, I screamed "OHIO,” garnering a few curious stares from my fellow sports-queers gathered there at 9 am on a Sunday morning.
Most of my football viewing prior to 2021 was that: World Cups and glimpses. Then I got a full time job that paid a living wage, and suddenly the world of club football opened up to me. Now it's an embarrassment of riches. Peacock, ESPN, Paramount+, and DAZN feed me a constant stream of football matches, live or on replay. I could watch football every hour of every day and still not see it all. Often, I work with a match in the background during the weekdays, catching up on matches I missed over the weekend, or keeping up with weekday evening European matches during my afternoons.
After years of following my beloved, floundering Stoke City in google searches, I can now watch some of the games live and, thanks to the Stoke City FC app, listen to all the matches on Stoke Radio BBC. I can watch women’s club soccer all year-round, thanks to the summer NWSL and NSL seasons, and the fall to spring European seasons. I could, if I chose to, watch every minute of the English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, and Germany’s Bundesliga.
We don’t watch Messi Major League Soccer in this house though. Which leads me to another thing I love about the sport: It is truly a team sport. You can have the greatest player in the world on your team, but there’s 10 other players and if the one can only do so much to carry the rest. This is part of why I don’t much care for the football superstars like Messi, Ronaldo, and Haaland. They take over the story. It stops being about team play and becomes “Messi and his supporting cast” or the like. I know this is somewhat unfair, but it’s just my truth. In Messi vs Ronaldo, everyone loses, in my opinion. Give me the 2015-16 Leicester City team, who won the Premier League only a year after getting promoted up from the Championship. Now that’s an underdog sports drama.
Speaking of, I love that each match is an individual drama, all part of the larger drama of the competition or league. I love the highs and lows of it all, the joy and anguish on the players’ and supporters’ faces, the last minute goals or early red cards, the matches that have next to zero stakes and the matches on which an entire season may balance. The first match of the season, the finals, and the slogging in between. And the way it all fits into infinite storylines.
I also love the limited commercial breaks, if I have to get a little more practical about it. The fact that I can go 45 minutes without a gecko or the human embodiment of chaos selling me insurance, without hearing turbo tax try to sell me their product that solves a problem they made through their lobbying, without Coke telling me how to live my life? I appreciate it, not going to lie.
I also like that the game is fundamentally the same regardless of gender. Some team sports played by men and women are weirdly different in action. I get that they all have their similarities, but in football, you are truly watching the same game. We could get into the nuances, the way they differ, but they are more the same than not. As demonstrated by an ad by Orange before the 2023 Women’s World Cup, if you don't see the ponytails on the players, you wouldn't know the difference on the surface.
I also like the lulls and surges, the fact that I can miss five minutes, and miss nothing at all, or look away for a second and miss everything. I like that you can have a match with 5 goals that can be just as exciting as a match with none. I like when commentators get bored and start saying total nonsense, or fit in a hundred references to Taylor Swift. I love when you get an iconic moment that has nothing to do with the game at all, or a goal that you watched live that will be remembered for decades to come.
Maybe this is all prejudice. Maybe actually I could say the same things about a lot of different sports. Maybe I just like football for no good reason at all. But I can tell you what, I certainly wouldn’t spend this money to go watch curling in Scotland or cricket in India.