There’s something about the new Premier League intro that plays before each game that bothers me. If you haven’t seen it, take a minute to watch it first (click the video above). It’s definitely a feel good video that illustrates the global appeal of the Premier League from Africa to Asia and other continents.

But if you take a closer look at the video, there’s something that bugs me when you analyze the different groups of people who are featured. They represent the following areas of the world:

  • Africa: Group of children running down a path to go to a home where they can watch a game on television.
  • Middle East: Young man wearing traditional Middle Eastern clothes and watching game on television. Near the end of the video, there’s video of two young Middle Eastern men walking down a beach in Dubai with the Burj Al Arab Hotel in the background.
  • Asia: Asian child watching the game on television.
  • United Kingdom: Middle-aged woman in a crowd. Father and son walking toward the football ground.
  • Unknown: Group of fans watching a game in a pub, wearing blue/white and red/white scarves.

It’s this last group that bothers me. What part of the world do they represent? Are they the miscellaneous category of other people from around the world that aren’t represented by the other places profiled — i.e. North America, Australia, the rest of Europe (outside the United Kingdom), etc? It can’t be Australia because EPL games there are played in the middle of the night, and it’s definitely daytime at this pub.

It’s hard to see in the grainy video, but by taking a closer look at the people who are portrayed in the pub, you can see a mixture of men, women and people who are black and white. Then there’s one individual who looks partly Hispanic but then could even be Turkish or  a similar ancestry.

The pub scene is puzzling because at first I thought they were trying to paint the pub scene as being in America — which it very well might be. But if that’s the case, they did an extremely poor job. All of the other areas of the world featured in the video are easy distinguishable between each other except for the pub scene. Perhaps the pub scene is supposed to be people in North America watching a game? However it doesn’t look anything like what happens in Nevada Smiths.

The reason the video bugs me is not because I can’t figure out which area of the world the pub scene is trying to represent. Instead, it’s because North Americans aren’t easily identifiable (if at all identifiable) in this video. The Premier League for too long has been focusing its energy and resources on building the game in Asia and the Middle East, while North America seems like the red-headed step child that receives very little or no attention. To me, the video intro to Premier League games is a slap in the face for football supporters in North America despite the fact that we support the league and its teams just as well as any other part of the world.