March 7, 2024
I am an American supporter of Everton Football Club. These days, when I say that to anyone who knows anything about English football, they look at me with a puzzled expression and wonder how in the world that happened. There’s a story, I say, but it’s a bit long-winded. After all, Everton have struggled in the Premier League for several years in a row, and they have mostly been fighting off relegation for the past three years. How could this fate have befallen me?
The Tale of Woe That Is My Own Playing Career
My relationship with soccer goes back to my early teen years. After moving to Texas at the end of eighth grade, I decided to sign up for a sport. Not being very good at any of them, I thought that soccer was my best sport. It turns out that it is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that soccer was my best sport, and second, that I was not a good soccer player. I tried really hard that eighth grade spring and summer, and I improved a lot. I made it through one more season beginning in late ninth grade. Throughout, I played as a left back at a time when, and in a system where, youth defenders did not venture forward. My main job was to stop attacks up our left side, to get possession of the ball, and to pass it up to the midfielders who would start the attack anew. In hindsight, I was passably good at accurately passing, and my left foot was almost as good as my right, so that these were my main skills.
My second and last season as a youth player ended in a collision with an opposing team’s right wing as I raced forward to beat him to a ball over the top. I managed to get to the ball first – tragically, this may have been the best game I ever played! – but I was also 50-60 pounds lighter than him, and the collision sent me flying backward. I landed on my left hand, and soon felt a serious pain in my wrist. The guy playing left center back in our 4-3-3 later said he had heard a bit of a crack when I landed. An x-ray revealed that my wrist had a minor fracture, and I found myself in a plaster cast from my hand to above the elbow.
Our high school had a soccer team, and several of the guys from my youth team were on it. I had gone on to other activities that I was much better at, even if they were a lot less cool: band, debate, math and science team. Even though we remained friends throughout high school, none of those guys ever once suggested I should come join them on the soccer team.
I had one final bit of glory as a player when my freshman dorm hall put together an intramural soccer team that had surprising success. Again, I mainly played defender in an 8-on-8 small field version of soccer. We won all but one game during the regular season; that one game was my finest moment, my only goal ever, and encapsulated why I was never destined to be a soccer player. The opponent was the fourth floor of our same dorm, and it was the wing where the university placed a large number of international students. With most of them having played real football their whole lives, they were very good. But against us, they had a bad day. We ended in a draw, which was resolved with a penalty shootout. The outcome was set from the start, when one of our opponents, a Brazilian, stepped up and calmly went top bins with the first attempt. They made their second shot as well, while the opposing keeper blocked our first two shots. I came next, despite never once having attempted a penalty in a game or in training. I lined up. I stared directly at the lower left corner. I began my run-up, and the keeper was already heading to his right, exactly where I meant to kick it. I committed every error an inexperienced penalty taker might. I looked up before I made contact with the ball. I’m sure I leaned back a bit. The result was that I did not catch the ball flush on the laces. Instead, I hit it with the outside of my right foot. But fortune smiled on me that day, as the ball went just to the right of center of the goal about three feet off the ground – not far from the spot the keeper had vacated in anticipation of my shot going where I intended it. I had scored the penalty – indeed, the only one we made that day – and I acted as if I had meant to do what happened, knowing full well what a fraud I really was.
A couple of years later, I was in summer school during the 1986 World Cup. My roommate and I went full crazy watching as many matches as we could, disappointed to see our chosen England lose in the quarterfinal to Maradona and Argentina. (My roommate’s dad was born in England and had played soccer in Canada in his younger days.)
Eight years after that, I had my first in-person experience with the enthusiasm of football supporters. The 1994 World Cup had come to Dallas in the form of a quarterfinal between Brazil and the Netherlands. My wife and I were sitting by the window of a burger joint on Greenville Avenue, when we saw coming down the street a car filled with Brazil supporters. They had bought a 1970’s era Cadillac, chopped the top off of the car, and mounted Longhorns to the front. There were about 10 of them, with three sitting atop the back of the back seat, blaring samba music and singing loudly. They were having a great time in the run-up to the game (and Brazil eventually won the cup at the Rose Bowl). From then on, I paid attention as well as I could to the World Cup every four years, but that was the extent of my soccer fandom.
A Christmas Surprise
Flash forward to 2006. T’was days before Christmas, and our family was staying with my mother-in-law for the holiday. We had three daughters, ages 8, 4, and 2, and the 4-year-old had just begun playing soccer. A friend of ours was coaching her team, and I had been drafted to help on the basis of my brief and unremarkable youth soccer career. But this exposure to the youthiest of youth soccer sparked my interest in angles and pathways and strategy that would shift around my sports-rooting interests.
On that night in 2006, everyone in the house had gone to bed and I, as a closet introvert, was recovering from the fray by flipping channels on Grandma’s cable TV. As I skimmed through the choices, I paused on Fox Deportes, where a fútbol match was on. Though the commentators were speaking in Spanish – way too quickly for me to follow along with my 20-years-past knowledge of intermediate Spanish – I realized that these teams were not playing in Mexico. Instead, they were playing in the daytime (so this was obviously a replay), and the players and especially the crowd looked very English. The team names in the scorebox were WIG and CHE, and I was intrigued. CHE beat WIG 3-2 as I dozed off and on, and the next morning I searched the internet to find out what I had been watching.
Of course, anyone familiar with English football knows that I was watching Wigan Athletic play Chelsea, which means I was watching a game from the English Premier League’s “Festive Season.” Wikipedia was quite handy to tell me that Chelsea played somewhere in London, and that Wigan was near Manchester. I looked at the listing of teams in the Premier League and a map of England that showed where teams were located. Having only been to England once in my life – five days in London in 1985 – the places didn’t mean much to me. But I got to thinking that I should learn more about this league and perhaps pick a team to follow on the internet.
A couple of months later, I was a visiting scholar at George Mason University’s Center for Study of Public Choice in Fairfax, Virginia. During that Spring 2007 semester, I traveled to Fairfax four times for two weeks at a time without my family, staying in extended stay hotels. On one of these visits, my friend Mike Makowsky, who was a GMU grad student at the time, was wearing a puzzling soccer jersey with the name Hahnemann on the back and the number “1”. (He liked wearing hockey jerseys, too.) I asked him about the jersey, and he said it was a Reading FC goalkeeper’s jersey with American Marcus Hahnemann’s name and number on the back. We chatted a bit about the jersey and Mike’s preferred EPL side (Tottenham Hotspur). That night, I decided I was going to pick a team to adopt and began my research.
Of Course, I Did Research
I had several standards I chose to adopt in selecting my English football team for life. First and foremost and non-negotiable: there would be no front-running fandom. I have never liked it when people decided to root for a team like the Yankees or the Red Sox or the Lakers or the Celtics despite having no ties to the teams or their home cities beyond a desire to root for a winner. That meant the Big Four were out – no Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, or Manchester United. (Remember, this was before Man City and Spurs moved in to make it a “Big Six” – the opposite of the pattern for American accounting firms.) Several years later, I felt affirmed in having employed this standard after watching this James Corden interview by the Men in Blazers.
With the most obvious teams eliminated by the no-front-running rule, I decided I wanted a team with traits somewhat like the American teams I already supported. In the NFL, my team has been the Pittsburgh Steelers ever since I lived in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, so perhaps a team from a city like Pittsburgh was in order – rough, working-class, a bit down in the mouth (though Pittsburgh itself was already re-emerging as a tech hub by the start of the 21st century).
I also wanted a team with a history, someone who had won things in the past even if it had been a while. This was in accord with my college football support of my alma mater, the Baylor Bears, who were in a decade-long freefall and had last been relevant on the conference and national levels when I was a student there in the 1980s. Similarly, I wanted the team I chose to have a chance of winning again someday, even if that meant only an occasional season of wonder amid the mediocrity. In part, that was because I really didn’t want to have to follow a relegated team down into the lower tiers of the football pyramid, with even less access to coverage than I was already taking on in 2007.
Finally, I wanted a team with a jersey I liked. At the time, I did not look as bad in a football jersey as I do now, so I thought I might want to buy one and wear it from time to time. One simple reality there is that I just don’t like red jerseys, so even if I wanted to pick a Big Four team I would be left with only Chelsea. And I had learned enough about Chelsea and Roman Abramovich to know that I wasn’t knowingly going to support a team run by a Russian mobster, er, “oligarch.”
With these selection guidelines in mind, the search for a team began. I started off looking at the cities where the other 16 teams in the Premier League were located. The long list of possible teams included Newcastle, Manchester City, Everton, Aston Villa, West Ham, and Tottenham. There were immediate problems with all but Newcastle and Everton – I hated the kit. Villa and West Ham both had that light blue and maroon nonsense, and Man City was just light blue. Yuck. Spurs had two problems – I didn’t really want a white jersey, and I don’t like France’s chicken logo – so why would I want to forever root for Spurs’ chicken logo? But that Everton logo with Prince Rupert’s Tower, “1878,” and “Nil Satis Nisi Optimum”? Pretty cool looking.
But I tried to keep an open mind as I began to learn the history of English football and of specific clubs. I learned that professional football began in 1888 with the formation of the Football League by its charter members Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion, and Wolverhampton Wanderers. The ones in bold were in the Premier League in 2006-07, so I reintroduced them as possible candidates. Bolton had white home jerseys too, and Villa was already eliminated on colors. So Blackburn was added to the set under consideration.
At that point, I shifted to each club’s performance over the years. At this point, Everton began to take the lead. Everton had been in the top flight of English football for more seasons than any other club, including the Big Four, and it had won nine top-flight titles all-time, the fourth most of any club (though the most recent had been in the 1980s). The only clubs with more were Big Four (Man U, Liverpool, and Arsenal). Neither Newcastle nor Blackburn compared.
I drifted back into personal connections to the cities where the clubs were located. Newcastle seemed like a Pittsburgh of England (unless we wanted to give that title to Birmingham, but Aston Villa’s colors – yeccchhhh!). Then again, I love the Beatles, which pointed to Liverpool and its own down-and-out history. So, in addition to Everton, I thought about violating the No-Big-Four rule for the Reds. But this is where personal connections doomed any hope of being a Liverpool supporter. I had to admit that “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Gerry and the Pacemakers was a pretty good club anthem, even better than “Grand Old Team” or “Spirit of the Blues.” But ownership was the deciding factor. Dallas’s own Tom Hicks was half of the ownership team that had just acquired Liverpool F.C., and I was already tired of his ruination of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars. For me, picking Everton was a great way to protest Tom Hicks. Moreover, manager David Moyes had declared Everton to be “The People’s Club,” and I liked that.
I also liked that Everton had begun as the parish team for St. Domingo Methodist New Connexion Chapel. Being a Baptist and a researcher studying the effects of state intervention in religion, I had an affinity for a club that started in a “dissenting sect.”
My next step at finding personal connections was to look for American players in the Premier League, though they were few and far between. Newcastle had American defender Oguchi Onyewu, but he seemed to be in the doghouse. Manchester City had DeMarcus Beasley, whom I didn’t even like on the USA national team. But I kept them as an outside possibility despite Beasley and sky blue. (I should mention here that I am also an alum of Duke University and its royal blue colors, with primary rival UNC and its light blue colors.) I discovered that Fulham had not only Clint Dempsey but also a history of American players. But those boring white jerseys and lame club crest? Pass.
I followed the rest of the 2006-07 season to help make a final decision. Everton finished sixth, while Blackburn finished 10th and Newcastle, Man City, and Fulham finished in the bottom half of the table. I liked the stability that David Moyes had brought to Everton, and the combination of Tim Cahill, Mikel Arteta, and American standout goalkeeper Tim Howard were very appealing. At the end of that season, I chose Everton and never looked back.
After that, I learned that players and managers come and go a lot faster than in American sports, so that in large part we are cheering for a shirt. I also learned that the club itself is committed to helping others through the Everton in the Community charitable organization, something that is a model for other clubs throughout Europe. Tim Howard and Tim Cahill are still my favorite Evertonians, and I’m a fan of Seamus Coleman and Leighton Baines as well.
To sum up this lengthy discourse, I looked for a team to support due to my long-simmering interest in soccer. I chose to be an Evertonian because of royal blue jerseys; a cool club crest; not Church of England; Tim Howard, Tim Cahill, Mikel Arteta, and David Moyes; Liverpool but not Tom Hicks; and the glory of upcoming UEFA Cup competition (now called the Europa League). It’s been up and down ever since, and since 2021-22 it has really been almost down with three brushes in a row with relegation. The expansion of NBC Sports coverage in 2014 to show every EPL game really stepped up the time I spend following the league, and I see just about every Everton match. It’s been a great ride so far and maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a league or cup title sometime before I die. Or – perish the thought – a championship in the Championship.