Football is the national sport of Britain by an enormous margin. The modern game was codified in a London pub in 1863, exported worldwide, and has since returned as a global industry of which the English Premier League is the richest part.
Not soccer
It is called football. The word “soccer” is, awkwardly for those who mock it, British in origin — a 19th-century Oxford abbreviation of “association” football, coined to distinguish it from rugby football. It was used in Britain well into the 20th century and only fell out of favour as the American usage grew. Using it here now will get you gently corrected.
Four national teams
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland compete separately in the World Cup and European Championship. This is a historical privilege: the home nations founded the game and negotiated permanent separate membership when FIFA was formed. No other country has it, and periodic suggestions of a united British team are resisted furiously in Scotland and Wales.
They combine only for the Olympics, as Team GB, and even that is contentious.
Supporting a club
This is the part visitors underestimate. You do not choose a club the way you choose a favourite restaurant, and you certainly do not change it. Allegiance is generally inherited or geographic, and it is for life regardless of results.
There is no draft, no salary cap, and no franchise relocation. Clubs are rooted in a place, often for over a century, and the idea that a team might move city — as American franchises do — is regarded here as close to sacrilege.
Promotion and relegation
The other structural difference. English football is a pyramid of leagues, and the bottom clubs in each division are relegated to the one below while the top clubs are promoted. A club can theoretically rise from a village pitch to the Premier League, and a Premier League club can fall. This means matches at the bottom of the table matter enormously, and it produces genuine jeopardy the closed American system does not have.
The competitions
- The Premier League — twenty clubs, 38 games each, August to May.
- The FA Cup — the oldest football competition in the world, open to hundreds of clubs from every level, so a non-league side can be drawn against a giant. Those “giant-killings” are the heart of it.
- The Champions League — European club competition, the biggest prize in the club game.
Match day
Fans arrive early and drink in the pub near the ground. Singing is constant, inventive and frequently unrepeatable. Standing was banned in the top divisions after the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, in which 97 Liverpool supporters were killed; safe standing has only recently returned in limited form.
Away supporters are segregated and escorted, which surprises Americans used to mixed crowds. It is a legacy of the hooliganism of the 1970s and 1980s, a period British football has largely but not entirely left behind.