Roger Bennett - Men in Blazers Present Encyclopedia Blazertannica: A Suboptimal Guide to Soccer, Americas Sport of the Future Since 1972

Hail! Unfortunate Accidental Readers and Great Friends of the Pod.

The volume you have in your hands was designed to be many things:

The final nail in the coffin of the long-floundering publishing industry.

Living proof that it is possible to write a worse book than Does God Love Michaels Two Daddies? by Sheila K. Butt.

An ill-advised attempt to journey into the inky dark, unexplored depths of the Men in Blazers universe, every detail of which we have created hand in hand with our masochistically loyal listeners over the past eight years, pod by pod, show by show, tweet by suboptimal tweet.

To achieve the first two objectives, we chose to focus solely on the third. This task demanded we wallow in the history and culture of football, the sport we both love. With its pantheon of heroes and villains, moments of glorious ecstasy and searing despair, dodgy haircuts and surplus neck tattoos, it has empowered us to experience emotions other people seem to feel in real life, to which we are both inured. No telenovela could provide soapier story lines to keep us hooked like footballa game with plot points that unfurl live without a safety net, as the whole world watches.

Witnessing the game we love grow and grow in America, the nation that we love, has been the thrill of our lifetimes. We both arrived on these shores as innocents, equipped with full heads of our own hair, in the early 1990s. Back then soccer had seemingly forever been cast as Americas Sport of the Future, its recent past little more than a collection of false dawns and hyperbolic predictions that it was about to become the Next Big Thing.

We well remember the day when FIFA announced its intention to host the 1994 World Cup in the US, prompting panicked former-AFL-quarterback-turned-US-representative Jack Kemp to declare on the floor of Congress: I think it is important for all those young men out there who someday hope to play real football where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.

Yet, slow and steady wins the race. We have watched with wonder, World Cup to World Cup, as the games profile has inexorably risen to the point that the sports profile has taken its place alongside seersucker, cheesesteaks, and the collected works of Raymond Carver as a symbol of American freedom and democracy.

Indeed, our obsessive love of football and Men in Blazers very existence has been possible only because it was powered and reinforced by that surging rise of interest, as well as by the fact that you allow bald men on television in the United States.

The question is often asked as to why, season to season, week to week, game to game, more and more Americans have fallen under footballs poetic sway. Many theories have been advanced. Just as baseball thrived in the Golden Age of Radio, and the NFL was the perfect televisual sport, soccers rise has been driven by the Internet in general, and EA Sports FIFA in particular, which have enabled fans in Los Angeles or North Dakota to experience and follow their teams as closely as supporters in Leicester or Newcastle.

Also, alcohol. If a gent is in a bar drinking a beer at 7:30 in the morning, society deems him to be an alcoholic. If Liverpool are losing to Bournemouth on a television in that very same bar whilst that aforementioned beer is being quaffed, we consider that man an American soccer fan. If we have learned only one thing during our beer-stained Men in Blazers odyssey it is this: Never underestimate the extent to which Americans adore an excuse to drink during the daytime.

Ultimately, we like to believe footballs American boom has been made possible by a realization that sporting audiences here have made en massethat when they experience soccer, they might not be watching home runs, end zone dances, or tomahawk dunks. They are glimpsing life itself unfold before their eyes. The legendary Arsenal manager Arsne Wenger once articulated this best when he said, Football is like real life but in a more condensed way, more intense. At some moments it catches you suddenly and it can be very cruel.

As two men, we could not be more different. One of us is an optimistic Londoner who believes everything is possible. The other, a negative Liverpudlian who sees Cossacks lurking behind every door. Yet we are bonded by a mutual understanding that soccer in all of its formsmens or womens, international or clubas long as it is played by bipeds, is the key to understanding human existence. As George Eliot once said: