Read for the 2018 PopSugar reading challenge. This is "A book about or involving a sport" - in this case, the European, specifically English, style of football. It was sitting there on my girlfriend's shelf for me to pick up.



I can't imagine this book was ever groundbreaking, but it probably felt a bit more new and different when it was, well, new. In the decade or so since Culpepper has published it, the Premier League has become a slight bit more familiar over in America, such that a person who

Read for the 2018 PopSugar reading challenge. This is "A book about or involving a sport" - in this case, the European, specifically English, style of football. It was sitting there on my girlfriend's shelf for me to pick up.



I can't imagine this book was ever groundbreaking, but it probably felt a bit more new and different when it was, well, new. In the decade or so since Culpepper has published it, the Premier League has become a slight bit more familiar over in America, such that a person who decides to start following the action does not have to actually move to England. What's more, things that bore repeated mentioning in Culpepper's mid-00s tale, like the testimony of several steroid-suspected baseball stars before Congress, just don't really matter any more, contributing to the whole thing feeling rather dated.



To be sure, however, moving to England is absolutely a necessity to get the part of the experience that might involve befriending a blue bear, taking a train all across the countryside to get to games, and most importantly, what one must do when one lacks "a ticket-buying history." It sounds like a lot of fun, along with all of the songs, some of which are not very nice to their subjects, but as Culpepper relates from the English, there are some parents who teach their children that there's "stadium language" and "everywhere else language."



A number of summers ago, a couple of Premier League clubs came and played a friendly in Baltimore, just to try to build a little excitement or something, I don't know. The match did not involve Manchester United in any way, but at some point fans of both teams started chanting the following, to the tune of the chorus of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:



Where the fuck is Man United?

Where the fuck is Man United?

Where the fuck is Man United?

They are not fucking here!



They all seemed like a hell of a lot of fun. I have discovered in the subsequent years that, no matter how fun it seems, I'm not getting up early on my Saturday mornings (five hours behind England, after all) to watch them.



I guess it's a necessity to have the author figure prominently in a travelogue-y book in this vein, but I would have liked a bit less of the self-indulgent stuff. For instance, trying to turn his unfortunate rail replacement journey into an important fan suffering story was not so great. I got what he meant, it has to be weird; as a person who is 34 years old and has not had his favorite baseball team win the World Series in his lifetime, I understand the suffering and it will make success, if they ever do win it, sweeter. But you can't rush it.



I have looked at the fortune of Portsmouth since Culpepper wrote this book, and if he stuck it out, he certainly got his suffering, as although they won the FA Cup not long after he chronicled his introduction to the fandom, his club, which is also called Pompey for some reason I don't know, quickly toppled into relegation land, ending up as low as the fourth-division League Two before climbing back to third-division League One this season.