Last Saturday, I realized one of my life's dreams — attending my first Premier League match: Norwich City at Arsenal.
Of course, you would get a broadly similar experience going to, say, an NFL game; the atmosphere is that same sense of a state fair combined with a life-or-death battle.
But for me, a longtime Premier League fan who has never been to England before, it was impossible not to feel like every moment was straight out of a dream — stepping off the Tube at Arsenal station, buying a scarf from a stand in the street, even climbing the steps to the famous North Bank stand. It all felt straight out of a fantasy.
Maybe the best way to explain what the Premier League is like is a quick anecdote. While Norwich is struggling to avoid being relegated, Arsenal fans' discontent with their team is running high. After a first half in which Arsenal held the ball for comfortably 75 percent of the play, but the Gunners failed to so much as put a single shot on target, one middle-aged man in my section had enough shortly into the second half.
After another endless series of Arsenal passes that failed to make any progress toward the goal, he stood up and bellowed despairingly, "Go FORWARD!" drawing chuckles from people around me.
It was an example of what, to me, is one of the chief things that turns American soccer fans into fans of European soccer. Apart from a handful of middle-aged people in the Dark Clouds section at Minnesota United games, you don't get much in the way of older fans who are into the game enough to loudly berate the team.
That all-consuming multigenerational fandom feels important, in a way that American soccer culture doesn't, at least not yet. It's no wonder some fans look across the Atlantic.
Ever since the aftermath of the 2002 World Cup, when it became clear that MLS was not going to fail and that English soccer would be a legitimate other option for American soccer fans, many people have wondered when, if ever, American soccer will catch up to its counterpart from across the pond. England always will have a century-long head start over America in soccer history, but what really gives them the advantage is that multigenerational fan culture.
