I must have a problem. Just ask my wife—she’ll offer more than one. But this obsession with smoke stacks, abandoned structures, and population loss has finally paid dividends—in the form of a Premier League team.
The saga began about two and a half decades ago, when in my mid-twenties, I learned there are other countries.
This is not something I discovered in school or on the world news. I learned it the hard way, at a sports bar in New York City where a bunch of Europeans insisted on calling what they were watching football.
My understanding, as you might imagine, was that football should be played with the hands. I mean, Jerry Rice wasn’t catching the ball with his feet.
In any event, I eventually withdrew into my American shell, marrying a girl from West Virginia (the aforementioned wife) and gambling heavily on an amateur basketball tournament in March.
From there, things got even worse, as we moved from the New York City area to somewhere more properly American: Western New York.
I was in my element, listening to locals rave about the regional cuisine.
There was the white hot, a delicacy that outsiders might refer to as a hot dog.
There was also the Garbage Plate, a potpourri of said hot dogs—or hamburgers—with French fries, macaroni salad, and meat sauce. The concoction paired well with another local favorite called Genesee Light, courtesy the Genesee Brewery.
But along the way, something changed.
I started to feel self-conscious about my foreign policy knowledge, or lack thereof.
Initially, I tried the Sarah Palin approach, pointing westward into Canada as proof of my worldliness. Later, I took every opportunity to mention that one of our neighbors was Dutch—he promptly moved back to the Netherlands.
Feeling uncultured and helpless, the obvious finally occurred to me. To prove that I was like the Dos Equis guy, I would adopt the alternative form of football, the kind played in a far-off land called England in something called the Premier League.
I just needed, of course, a Premier League team to call my very own.
But which one?
And that’s where the bizarre obsession came into play.
Listen, you can’t really blame me. After all, I live in the land of Kodak, a company that once employed 60,000 locally and now employs a couple stray dudes, I believe.
In this town—Rochester, New York—we frequent businesses at an old pickle factory, an old cannery, some place that used to build pianos, and another that made radios. A rite of passage involves walking through the abandoned subway system, now home to standing water and state-of-the-art graffiti.
In other words, could someone like me truly get behind a team from London? London, Ontario, maybe, but the capital of England didn’t stand a chance.
Rust Belt loves Rust Belt, and that landed me in the northeast of England, in a city known as Newcastle upon Tyne.
The burg on the River Tyne, not far from the North Sea, had made a name for itself by mining coal, building ships, and embracing heavy industry.
The city’s population peaked at 340,155—in 1951.
In the 1970s, deindustrialization began to cripple the town.
Despite subsequent revitalization, thanks to Brexit, the region has been painted as ignorant and xenophobic.
The local football club, Newcastle United, was founded in the late 1800s and hasn’t won anything worth bragging about in decades.
It all sounded so wonderfully familiar.
Sure, Newcastle United is owned largely by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, raising concern about the country’s history of human rights violations.
But I’m privileged to know the real America.
No one here actually gives a sh*t about human rights.
Deep down, we only care about money.
So to my new favorite Premier League team, nab the cash and win one for the Gipper!
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