Watching Americans fall in love with football is like watching the fires of Mount Doom light up the dark sky over Mordor. Here in this New York bar, described by several online listicles as “the best soccer venue in the city”, I am Gandalf gazing at a pulsating orange glow in the distance with foreboding – a silent witness to the rise of a power that, once unleashed, will be almost impossible to stop.
It’s no secret that the United States is a country that takes sports very seriously, but it’s hard to describe to people who don’t live here just how deeply engrained it is in the culture. From a very early age, through high school and college, Americans are raised on a diet of several at once. Their sporting prowess isn’t immediately obvious to us from the outside because they are mostly content to play games that no one else does. But football, the most popular sport in the world, has been winning American hearts and minds at a rapid pace over the last decade.
