Liverpool Football Club have played in five competitive games so far this season and there is still no definitive answer to how they will cope in a post-Luis Suarez world. Out of the five, only against Tottenham away have they resembled the Liverpool seen in the latter half of last season. Manager Brendan Rodgers has been careful to remind everyone that last season started off slowly as well. The Reds started off with three stressful 1-0 wins in their first three games, lost to Southampton at home, and had a few lifeless trips to Newcastle, Hull City, and Arsenal littered in the first half of last season. From roughly February on, those flawed performances essentially ceased. Will Liverpool find their wings and soar with the contenders of the league yet again? The answer is not yet obvious, but the progress up to this point can be assessed.

Team Strengths

Liverpool have depth in attack this season. This could be seen in their Champions League game against Ludogorets Razgrad on Tuesday. Daniel Sturridge, Joe Allen, and Emre Can were out injured. Lazar Markovic missed the game due to a suspension that had carried over from last season. Liverpool still had Fabio Borini and Rickie Lambert on the bench to supplement their attack. Both players are good enough to be regular starters at mid-table Premier League clubs.

Liverpool also have youth running through the spine of their squad, but for the most part it is proven youth. Out of the players that can be expected to be regular contributors this season, only Steven Gerrard, Glen Johnson, and Lambert are in the post-prime stage of their careers. Gerrard is undoubtedly a focal point, but Johnson and Lambert should have a limited number of appearances. Youth can be listed as a weakness, but Raheem Sterling, Sturridge, Jordan Henderson, Allen, Philippe Coutinho, Mario Balotelli, Dejan Lovren, and Mamadou Sakho are only going to maintain their current level of effectiveness or improve. Young legs should maintain their energy throughout a long and grueling campaign in which Liverpool expect to compete for trophies.

Team Weaknesses

Unfamiliarity can be seen with just about every connection made on the pitch. The preseason didn’t make much of a dent as far as acclimating players. Injuries to Markovic and Adam Lallana meant that they only played 45 minutes combined in the preseason. Lovren was brought into the squad after they had returned from their American tour. Balotelli was brought in and has been immediately relied upon to bring a goal return in high-pressure situations. The players simply don’t know each other and it leads to stagnation in attack, communication and positioning errors on the defensive side. These are issues where the only formula for improvement is time and coaching. Rodgers is also going through a learning process – this is the first time that he’s ever had a deep squad competing on two different fronts.

While he has bought players with roles in mind, certain fits and combinations must be tinkered with. Scouting a player and actually coaching them can reveal the deepest of insights. It was one thing when Liverpool were in Europa League and the likes of Suso and Jonjo Shelvey could win away games, but the squad depth this time around will keep expectations high.

Goalkeeper Simon Mignolet had an average season overall last year and looks to be the same this year. Rumors are kicking around that Victor Valdes is incoming when he recovers from his knee injury and it would be a genuine improvement if he was anywhere near his top form if he arrives.

Star Player so far this Season

Raheem Sterling. Wide Left. Wide Right. Through the Middle. No matter where he is played, Sterling still manages to look like the most dangerous player in the team. For a 19-year-old to be this versatile and effective, any sort of ceiling projection has to be removed. It may still be a purple patch as far as goals are concerned, but time is starting to erode that hypothesis.

How was Liverpool’s Transfer Window?

A lot of evaluation is still to be done, but it was encouraging that Liverpool secured basically their first choice for every single need. The production of Suarez was never going to be replaced directly. Not even Suarez would have produced at the same level as last season. Comparisons to Tottenham’s handling of the Bale situation were always going to come, but Liverpool had a better core of players to fall back on than Spurs did. Liverpool had to increase their depth as Rodgers only had about 13 players he trusted by the end of last season and Champions League was looming.

Every transfer was done in a reasonably timely manner and Liverpool could sit back with their legs crossed on the table as other clubs scrambled around for moves late in the window. All three of the defensive signings have made encouraging starts to the season. Alberto Moreno and Javier Manquillo look like a great fullback pairing, with Moreno as the attacking threat and Manquillo showing the defensive qualities of a brick wall with legs. Lovren seems to be the leader and organizer that Rodgers craved in defense and he has looked capable on the right and the left. There is still some hysteria over Liverpool’s defense, but they are allowing the fewest shots per game in the Premier League thus far with one of the hardest schedules.

The midfielders and forwards bought are still tough to judge. Lambert was a cheap buy for a third or fourth choice forward. Lallana’s fee was a bit high, but he was the first target of Rodgers and the transfer committee and there are bigger plans yet to come for him when he’s at full match fitness.

Inflation due to an influx in television money and a premium due to his prime age and English nationality were definitely factors in the price. Balotelli’s fee was small for a player and goalscorer of his quality and will have been worth it even if this is the only season where he behaves and plays well. Markovic and Emre Can are young players with Champions League experience that look promising early. Perhaps a midfielder in his prime with European-proven quality could have been sought after, but that doesn’t seem to be the way that Liverpool go about their transfer business. Indications seem to suggest that they don’t want to create wage wars within the team and Rodgers genuinely seems to enjoy coaching players to their highest potential. Buying ready-made talents doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.

Best Starting XI

         4-4-2 (diamond)

           Balotelli    Sturridge

————–Sterling—————

—-Coutinho——Henderson—-

————- Gerrard—————-

Moreno   Sakho   Lovren     Manquillo

————-Mignolet—————-

Injury Concerns

Daniel Sturridge is one of the best strikers in the world, but he is constantly an injury worry. His health was the biggest fear for Liverpool fans as international duty approached, and it may have cost them some sort of result against Aston Villa and possibly more. England manager Roy Hodgson doesn’t come out in a great light judging by the complaints from the Liverpool side of things, but he doesn’t seem to be eager to change his ways anytime soon.

Jon Flanagan has just been ruled out for a few months because of knee surgery and that is a big blow as he showed capability last season of playing fullback on either side. That is a concern because Glen Johnson and Jose Enrique have totaled roughly three effective games between them over the last calendar year.

Joe Allen is still a few weeks away after suffering a knee injury due to a dodgy Andorra pitch for Wales and that is unfortunate as he had just found a run of form in the starting XI.

However, Martin Skrtel could prove his fitness and make a return to the side after missing the past three matches.

Manager Grade

7.5/10. Even with Sturridge out and unfamiliarity abound, losing to Aston Villa at home and barely scraping by against Ludogorets should not be happening. Rodgers waited a bit too long to change out of a 4-2-3-1 against Villa and having a left-back in the opposition box in the 90^th minute while up 1-0 in the Champions League has to fall on the manager’s shoulders somehow. Still, the underlying statistics, such as TSR(total shot ratio), you can summarise that it’s been a decent start for Liverpool and Rodgers’ charges.

Biggest Worry Going Forward

Will these players gel in a reasonable amount of time or at all? There’s no guarantee that a newly assembled group of players will find chemistry on and off the pitch. The track record of Rodgers and the players will go some way to alleviating these concerns, but the clock is ticking on the season and a few bad results can conceivably dig a hole too deep to climb out of. Manchester United, Everton, Spurs, and Arsenal have great talents and strong management. If it takes too long for the talent to click in the league, placing outside of the top four would be a major step back for the club.

Overall Team Rating So Far (out of 5 stars)

3 stars

The squad have only really put together one great performance out of the first five matches, but to come out with three victories in that process shows some sort of mental fortitude. A three star rating is based on the talent within the squad and there are higher peaks to hit. It will be interesting to see how the season plays out and who will become the star actors. Suarez and Sturridge looked to be just that in January of 2014, but the team ended up being the main attraction by the end of it. Rodgers and Liverpool fans will hope that history repeats itself.

With the World Cup set to take over the American TV and radio airwaves for the next four weeks, here are 17 reasons for first-time American viewers to be excited about this thing called the World Cup.

1. If England’s Roy Hodgson was an American football coach and had Randy Moss, Calvin Johnson, and Larry Fitzgerald as wide receivers, he would ignore them, use the Power-I formation and run up the gut every time. England will probably have a dull World Cup, but they actually have some really exciting young talent in Raheem Sterling, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Daniel Sturridge.

2. Guys like Michael Bradley and Clint Dempsey will get buckets of air time on American television, but you may want to temper your expectations for the team overall. Spain or Brazil could see 20-30 injuries to different outfield players before either of those were even in the conversation to play if they were named Miguel Bradley and Dempsinho.

3. Cherish this time with ESPN and their classiness. You will care about the broadcasting in 4 years and FOX has the rights to the next two World Cups. Going by the early indications, it would not be a huge surprise to see Piers Morgan and John Madden in the booth for the 2018 opener.

4. There’s this guy for Italy named Andrea Pirlo. Cherish him. Admire his beard. Imagine his musk. He’s reached a rare stratosphere where he’s loved by everyone.

5. If Skip Bayless was a soccer fan (and he may be – I’ve been managing to avoid him for almost 3 years now), Lionel Messi would be all over his troll radar. Messi has individual honors and Champions League medals coming out of his ears, but there’s this push from some in the media that he needs national team success to cement his place in the Pantheon of all time greats.

6. Brazil is starting a striker named Fred. “Marcelo gets the ball on the left flank, lays it off to Paulinho, who slides the throughball into the path of Hulk, backheel to Fernandinho, and he fires in a cross and finds a mannnnnnnnnnnn and it’s put away by Fred.” Kind of a letdown in the cool Brazilian names department. Kind of a letdown as far as a striker too, but that’s a different story for another day.

7. This World Cup stuff is very exciting, but it’s just a fun little offseason sideshow if you fall in love with a club team. Your mileage may vary. Probably influenced drastically by the talent in your club team and national team. I also may be saying this because I am a Liverpool fan and I blast the Champions League theme song every day right when I wake up.

8. Everyone seems to have a different interpretation on how to deal with the umlauts for the German players. Be sure to annoy your friends by saying Mesut Özil and Mario Götze over and over again in the most interesting way you can think of.

9. Italy’s eccentric Mario Balotelli will somehow steal the spotlight at some point of this World Cup. It will either be with goals or with ridiculous behavior, but it will happen.

10. Dutch manager Louis van Gaal is like the Gregg Popovich of soccer when it comes to the media. Times ten. Let’s hope some journalist throws him up a softball so we can feel his wrath.

11. Sorry, but we’ve got to do another Roy Hodgson thing here. Just watch his mannerisms on the sidelines. Majestic scenes. ESPN3 needs to ditch the tactical camera for England matches and do a Hodgie Cam instead. I’d even consider flinging the Hodgie Cam to the big screen and having the actual gameplay footage on my 7 inch tablet screen.

12. To be a professional American football player you need massive size, speed, toughness or all of the above. Succeeding in the ranks of baseball requires a rocket arm or the ability to hit the ball four hundred feet when it’s coming towards you at ridiculous speeds. A lot of basketball dreams die when you’re a junior in high school and have only reached 5’9”. One of the beauties of soccer is that you can be deluded enough into talking yourself into the idea that you could’ve made it somewhere! Even obscure countries that you haven’t heard of have professional leagues.

13. It’s a multi-billion dollar sport with billions of eyes on it. Something as simple as calculating the amount of time lost to injuries and substitutions should be added at the end of each half and is probably down to an exact science, right? No! The only time you ever hear about it is from a bitter manager and then it seems to go away quickly thereafter. Bizarre stuff.

14. Can you notice how there are no commercials during gameplay? The English Premier League signed a 3 year, $250 million year deal in 2012 for the United States market knowing that there are no commercials during gameplay and that the latest weekend game starts at 9:30 am on the West Coast. Remember that and let your anger boil as the NFL goes to break for every turnover on downs and the NBA has multiple television timeouts on top of the 7 total timeouts each team is afforded.

15. Belgium has managed to swing from underrated to overrated and then back to underrated again in the past couple of months. They’re like the Russell Westbrook of national teams.

16. You see that huge, quick, and powerful guy named Pogba covering every inch of the field with aplomb for the French team and leading them very deep in the tournament? He’s only 21 years old and Manchester United lost him and got nothing in return. Hating Manchester United will probably be a thing for you if you stick with this soccer stuff, so be sure to get a chuckle in at their expense.

17. Try to throw away preconceived opinions from our culture that you have incorporated into your own psyche and just enjoy what’s on the television. I still get snarky comments from people close to me for scrambling for a television on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but I just don’t care anymore. One of the best parts of maturation is coming to terms with the idea that you should just enjoy whatever’s fun and ignore external perception.

What are some of the reasons why Americans, as first-time World Cup viewers, should watch the tournament until its climax? Share your advice in the comments section below.

We’re officially in striking distance of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. A decent enough hamstring strain has the potential to linger into the opening group stage games at this point. One of the traditions around World Cup years in the United States is the media asking whether or not this cycle is going to be the time where it all clicks and propels the sport onto the major national scene. True soccer fans and the Average Joe seem to be united in their outrage at this particular question being constantly thrown in their faces every four years. I’d like to argue that maybe soccer fans should embrace the question and hope for this to be the major breakthrough into the consciousness of the Average Joe or Jane.

These games will all be while we are awake and engaged. World Cup 2010 was decent enough for people living on the east coast, but still was not ideal. The typical weekday 2010 schedule was 7:30am ET, 10:00am ET, and 2:30pm ET. Those times basically wiped out two West Coast viewing opportunities immediately and had an entire slot taking place during a usual ET commute. This year, Noon ET is the earliest start time for a World Cup 2014 game. That’s absolutely huge on a national scale. The opening Saturday should make a strong impression as mother ship ABC will be broadcasting two soccer matches from noon until 5:00pm ET and that leads into two more on ESPN from 6:00pm until 11:00pm ET.

Social media will have an impact on this front. I can only go on personal experience, but Twitter specifically started as a platform for following celebrities, athletes, and news outlets and has evolved into much more than that. I’m now over the 500 mark as far as who I’m following and that includes my friends, people with similar interests, writers, satire accounts, and things that are just plain hard to categorize. It ticks a lot of boxes and affects my life in ways that it didn’t do in 2010. I’ve long since ditched following Kim Kardashian and any boring athletes and follow the ones that have unique and interesting takes. Average Joe won’t be able to escape the World Cup tweets in June and people are too attached to their accounts to avoid it for a whole month. ESPN is such a strong brand that has massive amounts of credibility with the masses that the World Cup will be staring at you in some form in every direction that you turn. Their strong production and incredible on-air talent selection should be a major boost as far as engaging fans as well.

Timing is crucial for anything to gain traction and the World Cup is in a near-perfect slot to take advantage in this country. The NBA Finals will be winding down as the World Cup starts and the games will never go head to head. I’d venture to guess that water cooler and call-in radio talk will be split down the middle with the NBA Finals in the first week and then the stage belongs to soccer. What that leaves is Major League Baseball alone. The big three of American sports have all embraced replay reviews and dozens and dozens of commercials to increase their revenue. Soccer must be licking its collective lips when it comes to that as the gameplay will stand in stark contrast to the downward spiral American sports have gone in. Tournaments are also perfect for capturing the imagination of any group of fair weather fans and this can be seen in the differences between regular season college basketball ratings and the NCAA tournament.

Well, why should the typical soccer fan in the States care if those “simple-minded,” previously conditioned Average Joes (their words, not mine) start to embrace the sport? We can watch all of the major leagues without buying a mega satellite and can find our fill of information in a dozen ways. For me, there are multiple reasons. A UEFA Champions League semifinal was just used as a platform this very week to experiment with a commentating team that literally made me mute the television and go on a journey through standard definition Spanish channels using the SAP button to try to find a reasonable way to enjoy the game. That’s ridiculous. I love Gus Johnson when it comes to basketball and American football as well, but it’s just tedious to listen to him call a soccer match. It wouldn’t have gotten to this point if this sport was more popular in this country. Too much outrage wouldn’t allow it. It goes to show how far the sport has to go for any broadcasters that aren’t named ESPN or NBC.

The scope of the popularity isn’t enough for any networks to dedicate a prime time slot to a daily highlights show at the moment. ESPN FC has been very good, but it is at 5:30pm ET on most days and you need to set a DVR Series recording to catch it if you are commuting home from work at that time. Not everyone can do that. It also gets bumped constantly. FOX Soccer used to have a show at 10pm nightly, but it has gone in the bin with Fox Soccer Channel. Saturdays are generally the most schedule packed days and the nightly Saturday shows are league specific and never all-encompassing. ESPN FC on Sunday nights is the best way to get caught up on the weekend of games, but they are covering a massive amount of leagues and it leads to abbreviated highlights. It also doesn’t help that it airs at midnight on a Sunday and you have work the next day.

A successful World Cup could push Major League Soccer and CONCACAF to improve. I’ve really, really tried to get into my local New England Revolution and MLS as a whole this season, but it’s been a chore. The style of play has bored me and the stadiums around the United States and Canada haven’t impressed me as far as atmosphere, the Pacific Northwest excepted. New York City FC being slated to play in Yankee Stadium is not a step in the right direction. A lack of television ratings nationally also means that MLS-specific highlight shows just do not exist. Those have been a huge part of my Premier League educational growth. The CONCACAF Champions League intrigued me from afar, but MLS teams don’t have the depth to compete strongly on two fronts and it leads to a poor atmosphere and weak performances for most MLS teams in the competition. Increased fan exposure and revenue could probably do wonders for the future of our local teams. They may have missed the boat as far as the drama of promotion and relegation, but there is still a massive ceiling to be explored on the American-based soccer front.

The United States Men’s National team being drawn in the Group of Death can be looked at a few different ways. ESPN’s Soccer Power Index gives the US a 34.3% chance of advancing to the knockout stages. This means that it could be a very short ride for the team and they could even be out of the running by the time the Germany game rolls around. It becomes quite the captivating story, though, if they are able to manage strong results. Portugal (47.9% of advancing-SPI) may just be a perfect storm opponent for the United States to encounter. Average Joe knows Cristiano Ronaldo and that he is one of the best players in the world. Portugal isn’t incredible as a team overall, though. Moutinho, Pepe, and Coentrao are other notable players, but the US could very feasibly get a result against them. The game being on a Sunday at 6pm ET comes into play and it starts to look incredibly appetizing for the people who eat up narrative and the YouTubers who patch together scenes at bars across the country with emotion inducing songs quilting it all together. Alternatively, this truly is a melting pot of a country and people will latch onto their heritage or star players anyways. It’s going to get massive traction either way.

Ultimately, a lot of people I link up with in the States can trace their soccer fandom to being sparked by their parents being expatriates, playing the sport themselves, or a World Cup. Heck, the World Cup 2010 is what hooked me. Frenzied atmospheres, smooth and uninterrupted gameplay, FIFA the videogame, big personalities, coworkers doing brackets, and USMNT drama were the pillars of what drew me in. I think this World Cup 2014 has a bigger potential net to catch people with. Millions will watch. It’s what happens in the aftermath that intrigues most of us. If everyone was similar to me, I could guess what the outcome would be, but Average Joe is still following Kim Kardashian on Twitter.

Finding a soccer club has completely changed the way I view sports and makes me want to shout its merits from the rooftops to the unconverted. You definitely risk preaching to the choir on a soccer website, but there’s a burning desire coming from within me to do so anyways.

These are my 10 best arguments for soccer fandom being better than American football fandom. You can easily be a fan of both because of the time differences of the games, but I wanted to go after the scalp of the media stalwart of American sports!

1. Amount of Games/Length of Season

A typical NFL season runs from September to December — 4 months. It is seventeen weeks long and there is a bye week stuffed in there. Twenty out of the 32 teams (63%) play just 16 out of 52 weeks in the year. This is not due to poor planning. It’s a result of the physicality of the league and the impracticality of prolonging the season or adding two-game weeks. From a personal standpoint, I don’t even know how players can manage sixteen games as ten games in high school and college left me physically and emotionally drained of most of my willpower.

A Premier League season lasts from August until May — 10 months.  It may sound a little too long to the person who has never lived through a season as a diehard, but there are three or four international breaks stuffed in there where you are lacking a league game for a weekend. Those tend to keep you refreshed until the dying embers in May. Every team is guaranteed 38 league games as well as one or more games in the League Cup and FA Cup. The majority of teams will play more than that. There are many weeks during the season where you get midweek games. Meanwhile, Thursday night NFL games are followed by ten days off.

The soccer season being longer is better for the fan because you get more games to enjoy and the perfection of the scheduling means that everyone plays every other league team home and away. It’s also a fair way to assess the champion. NFL scheduling is supposed to give the better teams tougher schedules, but the volatility in the league from year to year makes it farcical.

2. Relegation Battles

When the 0-10 Jacksonville Jaguars and 4-6 Buffalo Bills face off in November, a neutral is only watching that one if they have CJ Spiller in their fantasy league or they have put copious amounts of money on one of the teams.

I was engaged in a matchup this past weekend between the 19th and 20th placed clubs in the Premier League because of relegation. This season is a special one as far as the relegation battle is concerned because we are 75% through the season and the entire bottom half of the table is still threatened with the possibility of relegation. West Ham is in 10th and any points gained at this stage make the beer that night taste much sweeter because they are that much closer to staying up. The NFL system might even encourage you to root for your team to lose once they are out of the playoff race to improve draft status. It leads to some strange internal mental battles as far as what’s best for the good of the team.

3. Proximity of Clubs

Searching on Google Maps has led me to find that the largest distance between EPL clubs this season is a 6 hour drive from Newcastle to Southampton. It would take 48 hours to drive from Seattle to Miami. Does this matter? Maybe not, but I think it can add to the supporter experience. If you are a Newcastle supporter and Champions League qualification comes down to the last game of the season in Southampton, that trip is a reasonable journey to make year on year. The NFL version of that is once or twice in a lifetime type of stuff that will cost you ten times the amount of money. Northern vs. Southern tension can also add a little bit of flavor to the mix.

4. Crowds

NFL crowds are lame. I feel like I barely even need to write anything here because a passionate NFL fan couldn’t even come up with a coherent argument against it. I’d reckon that the bulk of the home field advantage in the league stems from the road team sleeping in a hotel instead of their real beds. The Seahawks, Chiefs, and Broncos can definitely sway ball games with their crowds, but 3 out of 32 teams is a pathetic core of crowd strength. I’ve been to more than five regular season games in the past five years in a couple of different venues with playoff implications in play and any atmosphere was only coming from the PA system and the music.

Wigan is now relegated from the Premier League, but their games the last couple of seasons were poorly attended and there seemed to be a lack of supporter engagement. They stuck out like a sore thumb. That’s because every other Premier League venue up and down England and Wales seems to be rocking for any match you watch. Knowing a crowd is up for a game is important to me. I start to feel an emotional connection to a game when I wake up at 7:45am ET and Rebecca Lowe sends us to a fully packed stadium of a struggling club in the middle of the season. The fans are up for it because that’s their life. When you basically only support one club, there’s no other alternative and it results in white hot atmospheres. There’s simply no comparison in professional American sports. If the Bruins lose in the playoffs, you move on to the Red Sox and so on.

Player songs and personalized crowd chants are some of the most brilliant aspects of soccer crowds. If a manager is under the hot seat and his team are getting beat 3-nil, you can expect something demeaning like “You’re getting sacked in the morning.” They add to the atmosphere and ignite more hatred between supporters. The most you are getting from an NFL crowd is the crowd humming the tune of “Seven Nation Army” or something that every other stadium is doing.

5. Post-season

There is a romance that the NFL has manufactured with the single-elimination format where 38% of the league gets to participate. Single elimination games are pressure cookers for drama and can often turn indifferent venues and fans into a completely different animal. My issue with this format is that one game can lead to fluky results and that the champion doesn’t necessarily represent the best of what the league had to offer that year. Weather, bad individual performances, the volatility that exists in one game, or bad refereeing decision can all play a part. The New England Patriots in their undefeated regular season performance are probably the biggest casualty in this format. Their historical placement is drastically altered when they were probably head and shoulders better than the rest of the league. That one game flukiness definitely exists in the one-off UEFA Champions League Final as well, but there are more games to weed out Cinderella stories with the group stages and the 2-legged matchups leading up to it.

Qualifying for the Champions League and the regality around the competition is simply boss for someone who has only experienced American playoffs. UEFA have created a monster here. Even the draws to find out which team you are going to face off against are anticipated greatly. I’ve geeked out for it even though my team hasn’t been in the competition. Europa League lacks most of the punch and I think the issue is that there isn’t really significant money involved for the winner, but the addition of Champions League qualification for the champion in the near future should do wonders. It is thought of as a poisoned chalice for now because it adds on the games without giving you the funds to add reinforcements to your squad. I genuinely wonder how Swansea and Wigan fans have felt about it in recent years as it must be pretty exciting to be able to be recognized on a world stage. Fans love more games, though, and a midweek game under the lights in the knockout stage has definitely gotten my blood pumping.

6. Drama

It is possible that most of my issues pertaining to a lack of drama in the NFL are related to the fact that my American football team (Buffalo) hasn’t made the playoffs since 1999 and hasn’t really come too close otherwise. Parity in the league can be good and bad from a fan’s standpoint. Picking who I want to win in a September Jets and Patriots game is tough because you don’t know if you will be duking it out with both teams for the division, wildcard, or something else. It mostly becomes a situation where you can only go all out rooting for your own team. The rest of the league takes 8-10 weeks of sorting out before your rooting interests become obvious.

Before the Premier League season starts, it’s pretty clear which teams you will be rubbing shoulders with by April and May in the table. This leads to a very strong rooting interest from day one for most clubs. It’s why I fist pump and go crazy for a West Brom goal against Manchester United early in the season or get dejected as Artur Boruc is gifting a goal to Olivier Giroud. Fewer teams and the regular season being of uber-importance lead to end to end drama. The ‘regular season’ having an actual champion also has interesting consequences. Where in the NFL, the last week in the regular season will have the majority of teams looking ahead to next season or resting starters for the playoffs, the EPL’s last day usually features a fixture list with something at stake in each match. An average soccer match having about 3 goals also leads to a high chance of drama. Nil-nil scores are often brought up to beat over the head of soccer supporters, but those can sometimes be end-to-end thrillers.

7. Clubs vs. Franchises

Any owner from abroad that comes into England and thinks they are getting a cash cow that needs little maintenance is sure to be mistaken. Because the identity of many of these clubs is woven into the actual city itself, it becomes a political force. If you have low shirt sales in an American franchise, you can change the logo and the colors and might come up with a winner, sales-wise. Vincent Tan has tried to do this (and many other bizarre things) with Cardiff and it has made the city loathe the owner who took them up to the Premier League. Supporters groups actually have a voice and can make stands against higher ticket prices or just about anything they desire. There is a much different vibe with NFL franchises and they feel much more like corporations where it’d be impossible to catch the eye of the CEO. With only 8 home games per year, it’s also very hard to feel like you are ingrained in the culture of the club and location that surrounds it. Many franchises have had a transient history and that is extremely rare in any soccer club.

8. Gameplay

The actual sport of soccer was the part that caught my eye during the World Cup. The running time and fluidity of the game was a breath of fresh air from the stop-start, commercial-infested waters of American sports. You will get 45 minutes of the sport being played and a 15 minute halftime. Sure, a team like Stoke City can make 25 of those minutes feel like the stop-start variety with their set pieces, but I’ve found them to be a rarity and it’s actually quite fun to watch them do it against your rivals.

The detractors will always bring up the flopping. It does exist, but it’s much less than I had anticipated. Flopping and diving are also thrown into the English news cycle to a comparable level to what we see about Lebron James or Peyton Manning and his Omaha here in the States. As a result, repeat offenders are swarmed non-stop by fans and the media alike.

According to a Wall Street Journal article from Biderman in 2010, there are only 11 minutes of actual gameplay during the 3 hour NFL broadcasts and a full hour of commercials. It feels more natural watching a NFL game when it’s on television, but in person at the stadium, it’s just weird. We are also conditioned to it, but it’s just a brutal commercial fest. An average of 12 total penalties per game also adds to the deterioration of game time. For me, a lot of it is unbearable now after becoming a soccer freak. I simply can’t handle it.

9. Rivalries

Rivalries can be downright shocking in the sport of soccer. It makes you scratch your head a bit at the soft label that is constantly on the tips of detractors’ tongues. Constantly touted rivalries in American sports like the Cowboys-Giants, Yankees-Red Sox, and Ohio State-Michigan pale in comparison even to some of the lesser rivalries in English football. Any Red Sox game will feature a crowd interspersed with fans of both teams. That doesn’t cut it in England or any other European crowd for that matter. Violence would almost certainly ensue, if not for away fans regulations. Hatred goes a few levels further for soccer rivalries as some of the more extreme fans in the Liverpool and Manchester United use chants to mock tragic instances in the clubs’ histories. Local police often suggest earlier kickoff times for derbies as it means there is less time for fans to drink. These precautions are not even an afterthought in American sports.

Location plays a part in some; intense histories in others. When both of those streams meet together, watch out.

10. Media Rights

DIRECTV and the NFL have been in a partnership for as long as I can remember. This is not good for the out-of-market fan that can’t get access to that TV provider or simply doesn’t want to deal with it. Out of ten games in the 1pm and 4pm EST time slots, three are usually picked for national broadcasts. One of those 3 games is usually the local team and you are bang out of luck if your favorite team is in the same time zone as that local team. The alternative is to go to a bar with the NFL Sunday Ticket. I have done this at times, but my preferred method of following a team is on my couch and devoid of distractions. It can also get expensive to go out so often and I’m not going to go out and sip on waters at a bar because I am really self conscious and would assume the wait staff is clowning on me and my ginger hair in the back room. NFL RedZone has been a breath of fresh air and an amazingly innovative product, but it can be maddening if you are only following your favorite team with that medium.

There are now ways to watch your favorite Premier League team live and in HD every single week. It can be the best team in the league or the worst. Not every cable provider is on board, but I’ve found that most TV providers offer Premier League Extra Time. You can also bail on a game if one of the teams is getting blown out, where you are basically stuck with the national pick if it is the NFL. I’ve had 3 games going at times this season: one on the laptop, one on the TV, and one on the tablet. That’s just not something I ever would’ve thought to do with NFL games.

In summary, the rise of soccer in my consciousness has made the NFL and college football unwatchable for me. I tried a year without a fantasy football team last season and found out that that had been the only thing keeping me around. My Sunday afternoons are free now. Wait, except for Serie A, La Liga, and the MLS, but that’s a whole other story!

Disclaimers:

I am a Liverpool supporter.
I am a Buffalo Bills fan that doesn’t live in the Buffalo region.
I played American football in high school and in college.
I have only been watching soccer since the 2010 World Cup.
I have lived the majority of my life in the northeast of the United States where college sports are 5th on the importance list after the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB.