Soccer fans call the sport, without irony, “The Beautiful Game.” Sportscaster Gus Johnson, by contrast, does not luxuriate in the beauty of any game. The 45-year-old Detroit native is known to American fans of football and basketball for catchphrases and ecstatic calls more befitting a fan than an announcer. It has been said that Johnson puts the “madness” in March Madness, and YouTube is full of proof—like “Screaming Gus Johnson,” a clip of his call in a 2006 NCAA tournament game, after which Bryant Gumbel quips to viewers, “Gus will be out of the hospital in time for tomorrow’s game.” (ESPN’s Bill Simmons has postulated a tongue-in-cheek “Law of Gus,” which states that if Johnson is calling a game, dramatic moments are more likely to occur.) The typical criticism of Johnson is that he capitalizes on these moments at the expense of play-by-play; it is the color commentator, after all, who should be providing color. You could rebut that criticism by arguing that the emotion he brings to those moments more than makes up for his technical shortcomings. He’s like an enthusiastic terrier whose excited yips, even when a touch too loud or frequent or ill-timed, are endearing.

Given Johnson’s style, Fox must have known what to expect when it announced, in February, that he would begin calling soccer matches. Perhaps that is why the network made a hard sell, touting his bona fides like the “over a dozen [Major League Soccer] games on radio” he has called and—no joke—the “pick-up soccer games in a park near his Manhattan home” he has played in. The channel that once gave us the glowing hockey puck was now asking perhaps the most self-righteous sports fans in the world—soccer fanatics in America—to accept someone they would surely hate. And to do so immediately: Rather than ease Johnson into his new gig, Fox has set him loose on matches in Europe's top leagues. On Saturday, he will call one of the biggest sporting events in the world, the UEFA Champions League final, this year held at London’s Wembley Stadium and featuring German clubs Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich.

Sportscasters are a little like the décor in a bathroom: They may enhance or detract from the experience a little, but they cannot fundamentally mess with what you came to do in the first place. But try telling that to English-speaking soccer fans, who believe announcers should be reserved except in those moments when, every once in a blue moon, a goal is actually scored. Thus, the reactions to Johnson’s hire (helpfully collected by sports-media blogger Eric Sherman) included, “This is dumbest idea ever,” “America is doing its best to ruin World Cup,” “Gus Johnson is a fine commentator but he does not belong in the booth for soccer,” “Gus Johnson commentating the 2018 world cup is nothing short of a disgrace to the game,” and, “guess I’ll be returning to the days of watching World Cup En Espanol.” (This level of vitriol toward something as innocuous as the annoucer is, as we will see, downright neurotic.)

They ought to get used to Johnson. Barring an unexpected setback, his soccer profile will only grow later this decade: He's expected to call the 2018 and 2022 World Cup Finals, to which Fox owns the American rights. And besides, American soccer fans should have precisely the opposite reaction toward Johnson, who could help accomplish exactly what they have long claimed to want: that soccer be embraced by the entire country.

Concern-trolling over soccer in the U.S.—whether it will become a major sport here, and whether it will be defiled in the process—is a sport in itself. “Americans just don’t get a kick out of soccer,” sportswriter Bob Kravitz wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1990, and Irish soccer journalist Seamus Malin said in 1993, the year before the U.S. hosted the World Cup, “Nothing could be a greater mistake. I don’t think Americans should be tinkering with the sport. This is not their game!" (This sentiment is the other side of the coin from American fans’ shame at their benighted countrymen.) A 1998 USA Today article contrasted soccer-mad “ethnic enclaves” in Chicago with the country’s general indifference. “The vast majority of Americans, however, don’t care," McClatchy reported in 2010. Or, as the Boston Globe noted in 2006, also a World Cup year, “We care every four years.”