less lofty teenage distractions of trying to figure out the connections between girls and music), I didn’t fully appreciate the implications of the Premier League as a market force until I started traveling regularly to the United States from the middle of the ’90s onward.

Experiencing the then few soccer bars advertising “Premier League soccer” was the first time in my then 20-odd years of watching the game that I became aware of the league’s aggressive international marketing of itself as a “lifestyle option,” and the first time I heard a league and its teams collectively referred to as a “product.” Back in Manchester, where I lived from 1989 until leaving for New York for good, the idea of the relative strength of leagues was a discussion that hadBreen) lobbed his own keeper before getting himself sent off. I’d moved to the United States at the end of a season in which Sunderland had finished on a then record low of 19 points (a standard for ineptitude they would later surpass), via three managers and even one home game where they conspired to score three goals in their own net in one half. Yet that game, against Charlton, also typified what I love most about being a fan — the stands that day were full of the fatalistic gallows humor of men and women making the best of the almost-comforting realization that this was a team that would always let them down. As one infamous Sunderland fanzine was titled, It’s the Hope I Can’t Stand. Without