Who are we, and why are we here?

It’s not for the money, so there has to be a good reason why four, otherwise sane and productive individuals with grown-up responsibilities and jobs decided to devote a good portion of their free time to starting a website dedicated to a game that many in the U.S. badmouth even as they drive their progeny to a Saturday morning rec. league game.

So here’s the deal: I’m a complete latecomer to the beautiful game.

I’m not a latecomer in terms of PLAYING the game (I played soccer throughout the entirety of my formative years and through my junior year of high school. I’ve also played co-ed in various leagues for about a year now, both indoor and outdoor). I’m a latecomer to WATCHING it, specifically watching it on TV…late enough to still be in the process of completing my first full Premier League season.

It’s kind of embarassing, really; I’m Cleveland born and raised, and live in a western suburb that just so happens to be Brad Friedel’s hometown (my pastor was actually the goalkeeper for the four years before Brad at Bay Village High School). My whole family plays the game…but again, it’s the actual watching of the game that’s been hard for me or any other stateside fan until recently.

When we’re talking about people finding the game, a lot of people who haven’t played are discovering it and realizing that it’s not the borefest that they’ve been told it is. This might lead into them playing, them supporting a team, or just supporting the sport in general; at the end of the day, it’s something they’ve discovered. For me, it was something presented to me when I was kid by my father, who played college soccer in the ’70s. I remember being taught about offsides at a McDonald’s with a line of ketchup representing the defensive line and a straggling fry as the wayward forward when I was about seven. I loved (and still love) playing the game. As a kid, though, the only way I could actually watch was to watch Cleveland Force (and, later, the Cleveland Crunch) play in the old MISL at the old Ridgefield Colosseum; there wasn’t a local outdoor team that I could support, so I was stuck with that (the man I stole my name from, Kai Haaskivi, was the Force’s leading scorer and a local legend).

For whatever reason, the international outdoor game’s appeal eluded me. I watched some of the World Cup in 1994, and I remember Baggio shanking the penalty kick that gave the game to Brazil. My fourteen year old’s idea of national pride prevented me from watching any game the U.S. wasn’t involved in, though, and I missed a lot of good games because of that.

It should probably be noted that part of my reluctance to watch soccer had a lot to do with my reluctance to watch ANY sport; I didn’t particularly like football (and in 1995, there wasn’t any to watch in Cleveland), and basketball wasn’t really that interesting. Baseball bored me to tears. Simply put, I didn’t enjoy sports in the way that, say, my youngest brother did.

Fast forward from 1997 to about 2003; my parents were getting divorced, and said youngest brother was a freshman in high school and having a rough time. It was football season, and he needed a place to go…so I started following the Browns every Sunday when he’d come over to watch football. And because there’s nothing more humiliating than being shown up by your youngest brother in a trivia contest, I was a quick study at figuring the game out. The sport itself still bored me, but it was better than him not having anywhere to go. Football became an escape; we didn’t want to talk about anything real, but we needed to talk about something. It helped that the Browns were awful that year, really; it mirrored our emotional states pretty nicely.

Soccer still came up occassionally, of course. In 2006, the five kids of our family tried to watch the World Cup; the oldest three of us played, the youngest two hadn’t, and we figured it was a good family bonding experiment to undergo…except that that World Cup was awful. Nick Hornby wrote in The Polysyllabic Spree that watching the 2006 World Cup he, for the first time, understood why Americans didn’t like soccer. The diving, the flailing around on the pitch, the screaming for calls…that contest represented the worst things I’d heard about the international game. I didn’t watch another soccer game for two years after the final.

In 2008, though, Manchester United and Chelsea played in a Champions League final (you might’ve heard about it…?). And while I knew nothing about international soccer or club soccer, I knew that was the kind of sporting event that you watched anyways. A kid on my brother’s team had been a huge Man United fan, and when he died after suffering with cancer he’d stipulated that a portion of his ashes be sent to Old Trafford; not knowing Fat Ronaldo from Cristiano Ronaldo, I rooted for Man United for the first and (hopefully) only time, and wasn’t disappointed. That was a fantastic game, and since I’d started playing (my doctor wanted me to be more active; the only exercise program I’d ever known was playing soccer, so I’d gotten back into it) it only seemed natural to start watching it more.

I was on a very precarious perch there; I was willing to acknowledge that it was possible that I’d misjudged the sport, but I’d need to see some proof. And along came Euro 2008.

My conversion probably has two dates. The first was the moment the Netherlands took to the pitch on June 9th, 2008. I had DVRed the game so I could watch Italy, to be honest; I had no idea why the Dutch were in orange, but I figured they’d be Italy’s whipping boy in that game and could wear whatever color they wanted. As I watched, the Clockwork Orange did what they do best: they controlled the game. The controlled every facet of that game with patient, calm passing game that built up to a fast paced counterattack. This was technical football at it’s peak. I was riveted.

If that game proved how technical the sport could be, though, the emotional hook of the beautiful game was still to come. On June 25th, Turkey and Germany faced off in the semifinals; Turkey’s last game had been against Croatia, where nothing happened for 119 minutes only for Croatia to score, think they’d won, have Turkey score, and then lose to the Turks on penalties. I don’t truthfully remember when it was, but I remember watching a Turkish player (Ayhan Akman, I later learned) go for a header against a German player (Simon Rolfes); they banged heads, and both had to leave the pitch since they were bleeding from their heads. I figured they were done.

And then Akman had his head stapled on the sideline to get himself back into the game.

I know that not every player would’ve done that. I know that Rolfes had his head stitched quickly and got back in, too; less dramatic, but still more than I’d do. The passion to play for your country, the lengths that someone would go through to do it, and the fact that nobody thought twice about it fascinated me. I was already coming around; that moment sealed it.

What also sealed it was realizing that I actually had had the Fox Soccer Channel for two years or so, and had access to games. Liverpool was really a logical step; Liverpool and Cleveland are similar cities, and Liverpool fans are similar to Browns fans: they expect good play, and they expect for a return to winning ways. I read rants about Benitez that could’ve been written about Butch Davis or about Romeo Crennel; they don’t understand the team, they don’t understand the heritage, and they don’t understand what it means to be a fan.

It’s been a long time coming, but I think I get it.

Since we’re listing personal team biases: I’m a Liverpool fan and my wife is a total bandwagoner Aston Villa fan; I also try to follow Switzerland Super League side Grasshopper-Club Zürich peripherally, and will probably try to take in a good number of Cleveland City Stars games when their season kicks off. For national teams, I’m a fan of the Netherlands, Spain (since it’s basically like rooting for Liverpool with better fullbacks), Switzerland, and the U.S.;