This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

It’s back baby, it’s back. Even Dicky V and the N-C-double-blah-blah-blah can’t steal the excitement from my game. Spring has sprung and MLS soccer is only weeks away (and now with more German!). It’s time to take pause one last time and think about where we fit into the fandom.

Everyone approaches professional sports differently - from season tickets all the way over to television season passes - but in soccer there is a different proposition. Your fandom can affect the growth of the game, something that can’t be argued for the other American pro sports. So what are you going to do? One man has set a course, and we’re all going to get to witness him see it through.

Englishman in Chicago Thomas Dunmore begins his matriculation into our game, and he’s letting it unfold in front of TIAS readers as he examines his newfound commitment to MLS.

His first installment also marks the return of The Diary Project, which by the way is always open to your unique American soccer experiences. Send in your stories to see them in the bright backlighting of computers everywhere. Dunmore takes the stage after the jump.

An Englishman in Chicago

by Thomas Dunmore

I recently came to a startling realization: I am an armchair soccer fan. Indeed, I’m even in danger of being mistaken for a Eurosnob. That is: I sit at home and watch European soccer obsessively on television, but I very rarely watch the American game in person. I have paid relatively little attention to American soccer since I moved to Chicago from England in 2001, and given I now call the United States home, only my English passport is saving me from the definition of a Eurosnob provided by the Bigsoccer wiki:

In football (soccer) circles, a Eurosnob refers to a person from outside of Europe who professes a great love of European football, or a particular European club or league (though not necessarily possessing significant knowledge of said league/club), while holding in disdain the sport in other parts of the world. In particular, Eurosnobs always look down upon their home country’s domestic league, despite lacking in significant knowledge of that league.

Becoming an armchair fan reverses my experience growing up in England; between the ages of 11-18, when my house did not have the necessary satellite to watch live Premiership football and I was too young to watch at the pub, I saw in an average (non-World Cup) season perhaps a dozen live games - whatever scraps the BBC and ITV had from the domestic and European cup competitions, and a few Premiership games at friends’ houses.

Meanwhile, I attended almost every Brighton and Hove Albion home game in the same period, perhaps in the region of 250 games, as well as the odd Tottenham Hotspur game. I watched in person as the Albion plummeted from being one victory away from joining the Premiership to being one defeat from leaving the realm of the Football League at the bottom end and joining the semi-professional ranks. I shall refrain from resorting to Fever Pitch clichés to explain that this meant a lot to me, but whilst I wished I could watch more Premiership football now and then, I was happy with my football world revolving around every other Saturday at the Goldstone ground.

Today, living in Chicago, I’m armed with a 34″ television, a DVR and three soccer channels (Fox Soccer Channel, GOL TV and Setanta) showing a plethora of games from around the world every day. I mainly watch the Premiership, but I’ll also make a point to catch the big games in La Liga, and I’ll happily pass the time with the Bundesliga or Serie A as well. In fact, I’ve probably watched more European football on television in the past six years in the United States then I did in my first twenty-two in England.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a pleasure to be able to watch such a variety of world football, and I’m glad to live in the United States in an era when it’s easy to do so. I would sorely miss it were it taken away, and I’ve no intention of suddenly ignoring European football. On the other hand, whilst my televisual football hours have grown exponentially, my experience of football in person (apart from playing it) has declined dramatically.

I have been to several MLS games, and have tried not to dismiss the league with the disdain of the average Eurosnob, but I have not been a regular at Chicago Fire games. I did not simply watch five minutes of an MLS game and bemoan the standard as compared to English football; as an avid supporter of Brighton and Hove Albion, who plummeted to the bottom of the entire English professional football pyramid in a season where I went to almost every home game, I don’t equate the desire to watch live football solely with the quality of the fare on offer. Being a fan of your local team is, for the football lover, simply an obligation; like death, taxes and family, it’s not really a matter of choice.

But I have found it difficult to embrace Major League Soccer. The many cavernous half-filled stadiums, often with beguiling American football line markings defacing the fields, made American soccer look like a foreign game to my English eyes (though thankfully, many teams now have appropriate soccer-specific stadiums). The strange team names (from the Dallas Burn to Real Salt Lake) and the unfamiliarity of the players unnerved me, as did the style of play.

The fact that MLS is on the periphery of American sports culture put me off, as I’ve tried to absorb and appreciate American sports culture. When I have talked about sports with most of my American friends, the discussion has always centered on the big three major sports (NFL, NBA, MLB). And even when talking with the numerous soccer-lovers I know, the hot topics have always been from European football rather than MLS. At an indoor pick-up soccer game recently, we all wore our favorite team colors and the proliferation of Barcelona, Arsenal and Manchester United shirts outnumbered MLS jerseys by a factor of infinity.

Yet it occurs to me that I’ve now lived in Chicago for two-thirds of my adult life. This city is in fact home, and it has a team called the Chicago Fire that I have not treated in the correct manner if I wish to avoid the lazy status of being an armchair Eurosnob. Thus far, I have only been a lukewarm fan of the Fire. I have been to a few games and I’ve watched them frequently on television. I was excited by their run to the MLS Cup final in 2003, and pissed off by their penalty shoot out defeat in the playoffs in 2006.

But I have not lived and died with the Fire. My footballing week is built around Premiership TV schedules, not Fire games. I’m sure the Fire’s hardcore fans - such as those of the admirable Section 8 supporters group - could care less about my ramblings and the attitude of Eurosnobs to MLS. But I for one am prepared to give MLS a real go, and MLS itself would be much stronger if it were embraced by the many soccer fans that prefer to watch the Premiership on television rather than MLS in person.

Personally, I want to experience live soccer on a regular basis again. I want to stand and watch the game, whatever the elements, whatever the quality on offer, just because that’s what I do as a fan of my local team. I want to feel the passion of thousands of fans around me, and not just the empty echo and the scattering of my startled cat in the living room when I cheer a goal on television.

I also want to see real football again, not the distorted vision of the television director: I want to see whole games unfold before me, observe off-the-ball runs, man-marking, why a player chooses a certain pass over another. On television, since we can only see a small portion of the field at a given time, players’ decisions are often only revealed to us after the fact. I want to see all the midfielder’s options before he chooses his pass: to see the open man slip down the wing, then see the ball played forty yards into the space in front of him.

A Eurosnob typically disdains MLS for so-called aesthetic reasons; and yet by choosing to watch football exclusively on the screen, the Eurosnob is making the worst choice of all to enjoy and understand the beauty and complexity of professional soccer. You can Youtube Ronaldinho moves all you want, you can wear his jersey, but you are only consuming a partial reproduction of the game.

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Thomas Dunmore will be writing periodically for TIAS, adding more thoughtful introspection from an Englishman in Chicago finding his way in American soccer. You can also read more from Thomas at The Offside where he will be blogging his immediate experiences during the upcoming Chicago Fire season, as well as on his own blog, If This Is Football, which examines the historical and political side of the world’s game.