One of the things that I've always loved about soccer in America is the DIY, punk rock ethos of the sport. While youth soccer (like any sport) can often be orchestrated painfully rigidly, and the very highest level of the domestic game is often an exercise in corporate legalese, there's a beauty to be found in low-level street soccer. I remember back in High School, I'd regularly play Saturday pickup games with a group of Mormon dental students, all of whom looked like they just finished an Abercrombie and Fitch photo shoot. The summer after I turned nineteen, I'd take two buses and a train on Thursday nights to play on a rocky West Philadelphia pitch, often being one of the only players in the country legally, and I'd get home around one in the morning, often bloodied. There were good players, and not-so-good players, but none of them was ever going to threaten to make it professionally. We were playing for simple love of the sport, for the cathartic release of a cutting pass, the triumphant feeling of a well-timed tackle, and that occasional, spontaneous ecstasy that comes from scoring a goal.


And then there's fandom. That weird cocktail of loyalty, competitiveness, socialization, love of sport, petty oneupmanship, and base tribalism that drives otherwise perfectly rational people to part with significant chunks of their hard-won lucre for the privilege of watching someone else play. Often, fans spend time and money crafting banners and tifo displays (The sheer size of Toronto's Dichio banner still takes my breath away), learning songs, and setting off pyrotechnics to show their support. I'm a member of the Sons of Ben (number 949, to be exact), and the story of the SoBs is a pretty interesting tale. Basically, a small group of soccer fans got bored with waiting for the league to give us a team, so they started going to games and MLS events with the sole purpose of annoying Don Garber into giving Philly a team. Long story short, the group isn't so small anymore, and we get to complain about goalkeeping errors and missed calls just like anybody else. The thing that always amazes me, though, is just how much work these average guys were willing to do to realize this pipe dream.


And it's certainly not just Philly fans. The American soccer landscape is more than just a lot of people who like game. It's a movement. There's a real cohesiveness born from the fandom, and shaped by our status as perennial underdogs. Our sport is under-appreciated by the mainstream American sports media, and in true punk fashion, we decided to solve our own problem. There is an impressive number of quality soccer blogs and podcasts out there, many of which were started by regular guys with normal jobs, who were simply tired of not seeing intelligent discourse about the game.


There's also a weird feeling of "we're all in this together" when it comes to rivals, which really doesn't exist in other major sports, or in soccer circles around the world. I may despise a certain group of over-caffeinated pitchmen masquerading as a soccer team, but deep down, I know it's better for the sport as a whole to have twenty thousand fans in a glorified bedpan than twelve thousand in the Meadowlands, and on some level, I want Red Bull Arena to be a success.


And then of course, there's Danny Califf's hair.