Hello Friends. This blog is dedicated to document the evolution of my love affair with Soccer (er--Football as it's called elsewhere, hence the title). My hope is that I can help many people new to the sport (i.e. fellow Americans), and those with more exposure can educate me.
My new found love affair with Soccer began several years ago. All thanks to a video game--FIFA (I don't remember what version, but 5 or 6 years ago). At random, or perhaps by divine intervention, I mainly played with Arsenal. For those people even less knowledgeable than I was, Arsenal is (or 'are' if you want to use plural agreement like the English) a Soccer (er Football) club in London, England. They have been around for quite some time--check out the wiki. Anyway, they have had various periods of success over the years, with the most recent being a 49 game unbeaten streak (not winning streak, remember you can tie in soccer) and resulting league championship.
Having never watched an English Premier League match in my life, it was odd that I new all the Arsenal team members by name. Anyway to cut a long story short, when a college buddy started talking about soccer a bit, I spouted out some Arsenal players names. He happened to be a Russian immigrant and supported (supporter is the more common term for 'fan' in the lingo) a Ukrainian club--Dynamo Kiev. His team and Arsenal happened to be in the same group in that years Champions League (the most prestigious tournament in club soccer), so we kept track of the teams progress together. The television coverage for European soccer at the time was spotty and hence we didn't actually watch the games.
I also started keeping track of Arsenal's progress more closely that season, but did not get to see the games. Then the next season, I noticed Fox Sports was showing some games live and more games replayed, so I started to Tivo watch the big games (Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool). Again, the following season, (2005/2006) I didn't watch many games as they were being broadcast on channels that I didn't receive. However, ESPN was showing Champions League matches, and I was able to follow Arsenal's run to the finals.
By this time I had thoroughly been sucked in (I'll take the time to explain in a later post) and was actually downloading the games via Torrents and watching them on my computer. Of course, this meant that I would have avoid learning the result before I was able to complete the download. Arsenal finished fourth securing a Champions League on last day of the season when rivals Tottenham Hostpur (think DUKE/UNC, Michigan/Ohio State, Yankees/Sox, etc) got food poisoning at their hotel and dropped points (i.e. did not win).
The next summer was great. The world cup and my first summer that I was fanatical enough to follow the player transfer rumors and speculations. Basically there are two periods during the year when it's possible to sign new players for your team (The summer and in January). I've never been part of something so frustrating. Anyway, Arsenal basically brought in 2 players William Gallas and Julio Baptista from Chelsea and Real Madrid repsectively.
The 2006/2007 was my first season as a true football fan. I watched every Arsenal game, and many other league games; left work to watch Champions league games; followed closely league results; watched weekly highlight shows; read countless blogs and listened to many podcast on the subject.
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