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Their Game, Now Ours

In the East Village, fans of Liverpool stand together in triumph.Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

What, you didn’t catch Liverpool storm back against Manchester City last week? You missed Wayne Rooney’s 58-yard wonder goal against West Ham United?

There was a time not long ago when Americans — even worldly New Yorkers who regularly logged on to The Guardian website and claimed knowledge of the best little out-of-the-way pub in Shoreditch — could float along in a happy bubble of ignorance, pretending for all practical purposes that the world’s favorite sport, soccer, did not exist.

That time appears to be fading quickly. With fan interest booming, soccer is no longer the Kylie Minogue of the sporting realm: huge everywhere but here. After years of being greeted as the Next Big Thing that wasn’t, the sport (particularly England’s Premier League, with its enhanced presence on American television) has become a conversation topic you can no longer ignore.

This is particularly evident in New York creative circles, where the game’s aesthetics, Europhilic allure and fashionable otherness have made soccer the new baseball — the go-to sport of the thinking class.

Gone are the days, in other words, when you could make a wisecrack about David Beckham’s latest hairstyle and be done with the topic (note to newbies: Mr. Beckham, retired from the sport, is now an underwear pitchman). Nowadays, smart-set types are expected to be conversant in European soccer. “It’s like the way you expect somebody to know what’s happening in ‘True Detective,’ ” said David Coggins, the editorial director for the Freemans Sporting Club fashion label, who writes about European soccer for A Continuous Lean and Valet.

While postwar literary lions like John Updike and Philip Roth looked to the diamond to find poetry in sports, the new generation looks to the pitch (field). David Remnick, The New Yorker editor, and David Hirshey, a prominent editor at HarperCollins, are soccer aficionados, and Franklin Foer, the New Republic editor, gained fame with his 2004 book, “How Soccer Explains the World.”

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Liverpool fans at 11th Street Bar in the East Village watched a match against Manchester City.Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

A new generation of literati is now following in their footsteps.

“It’s almost guaranteed that almost any male literary person under the age of 45 is going to be somewhat versed in soccer,” said Sean Wilsey, a writer who helped edit “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup,” a 2006 compilation of essays by the likes of Dave Eggers and Robert Coover. As a conversation topic, it has become inevitable at book parties, in part because it is both sophisticated and safe. “Isn’t it sort of a relief to talk about the English Premier League instead of the sad state of publishing?” he added. “It’s a great default topic.”

Among younger American writers who came of age on Nick Hornby’s soccer books like “Fever Pitch,” rooting for Arsenal, Mr. Hornby’s club of choice, is almost de rigueur, said Rosie Schaap, an American-born memoirist who considers herself a die-hard Tottenham Hotspur fan. (She also writes the monthly Drink column for The New York Times Magazine).

“Any time I’m at a book party or reading, and soccer comes up in conversation, I find myself surrounded by young men in shabby-genteel, loosely fitting tweed jackets gushing over the Gunners,” Ms. Schaap said. “In such settings, being an Arsenal supporter is even more predictable than having an M.F.A. or a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.”

For on-trend types with an internationalist bent, supporting (never rooting for) a Premier League club (never team) is not just a pleasant diversion, but a public display of global cultural literacy.

That may explain why, at 8:30 a.m. last Sunday, a lively crowd of supporters with tattoos and artfully rolled jeans showed up to Banter, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with plank floors that caters to Premier League fans. With several in Steven Gerrard jerseys and team scarves emblazoned with the Liverpool team motto, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” they settled in for a crucial live match between Liverpool and Manchester City.

Sure, anyone could have watched the game at home, thanks to NBC Universal’s $250 million deal to show all Premier League games. But football — a term some Americans have learned to appropriate without wincing — is a communal experience, even when you grew up 3,000 or 6,000 miles from the community that you have adopted as your sporting home.

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Manchester United This club is the Yankees. By rooting for one of the dominant sports brands in the world, you will be signing on for a lifetime of eye rolls from rivals. Famous fans: Justin Timberlake, Orlando Bloom.

Credit...
  • Slide 1 of 8

    Manchester United This club is the Yankees. By rooting for one of the dominant sports brands in the world, you will be signing on for a lifetime of eye rolls from rivals. Famous fans: Justin Timberlake, Orlando Bloom.

    Credit...

“You buy into the history and the tradition, the values of the club,” said Bryan Lee, a digital brand strategist who grew up in Southern California and lives in Greenpoint. He showed up in a vintage gray Liverpool away jersey. “Historically, Liverpool has been a blue-collar port city,” added Mr. Lee, 24, as thoughtful as if he were delivering his orals at graduate school. “The politics of Liverpool was really sort of anti-Thatcher. It’s become the people’s club. Those hardworking blue-collar values never really left, even though it’s been ushered into the modern era of the club being a global franchise.”

In a neighborhood that places a premium on authenticity, soccer offers plenty — at least compared to garish, earsplitting telecasts of American team sports. Unlike American football, there are no commercial breaks to disturb the balletic flow of action for 90 minutes, except at halftime. The rest of the world already knows soccer as “the beautiful game.” Aesthetically minded Americans have finally figured this out, too.

“Soccer is perfect for this neighborhood — it’s the alternative sport, it’s the too-cool sport,” said Michael Coogan, 30, a production assistant with flowing dark hair who lives nearby. “Williamsburg is too cool for everything.”

Even a few years ago, American converts seemed to be tiptoeing onto the pitch, as if unsure they belonged. They haltingly mouthed foreign terms like table instead standings, or kit instead of uniform.

That was not the case last Sunday at 11th Street Bar, an Irish-style pub in the East Village where members of the Liverpool F.C. Supporters’ Club NYC were gathering by 7:30 a.m. for the Manchester City match.

When Philippe Coutinho, a Liverpool midfielder, pounded in a goal with 12 minutes left to go, the red-clad crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder, erupted. Many joined in a throaty rendition of a traditional Liverpool supporter chant — “Oh when the Reds go marching in!” One burly young supporter, about 30, grabbed a wooden bar stool and began pounding it onto the floor in celebration, invoking the crowd to go “mental.” The accents were American, but the passion was real.

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At Banter in Williamsburg, supporters of both teams showed concern.Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

Certainly, soccer-loving Americans no longer need to look abroad to satisfy their hunger. The domestic Major League Soccer drew six million fans last year, and ties to the European game are growing stronger than ever (next year, the league will add a second metro-area team, New York City F.C., a joint venture between the Yankees and Manchester City). No wonder soccer proselytizers are insisting, with some justification, that the Big Four in American team sports has become the Big Five.

Still soccer remains, in the eyes of many Americans, a world game. And that world game is surging in the United States thanks to the explosion of foreign soccer on television and the Internet.

When Roger Bennett, a New York-based soccer pundit who grew up in Liverpool, moved to the United States in 1996, he remembers having to follow big Everton matches by telephone, his father holding the receiver up to the radio back home. Now, cable television is filled with soccer: Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and Mexico’s Liga MX. On the Internet, fans can follow matches from the Italian second division, check out Brazilian highlights on YouTube, and take in the latest gossip for VfB Stuttgart. In fact, Mr. Bennett has become a leading evangelist for American soccer converts through his popular Men in Blazers soccer talk show on Grantland and SiriusXM, which he hosts with Michael Davies.

“It is often said that baseball blew up in America in the age of radio, and the N.F.L. rose to dominance once television took over,” Mr. Bennett said. “Soccer is the perfect sport for the Internet era. American fans can follow games and instantaneously track information from global leagues both big and small, feeling as close to their favorite teams as if they lived within a thrown beer of their stadium.”

Despite the many soccer offerings from around the globe, and right here at home, the Premier League remains the vogue-ish choice for many New York creative types, according to Mark Kirby, a former GQ editor who in 2012 helped found Howler, a sumptuous soccer quarterly that was hailed by The Guardian as “a football magazine fit for aesthetes.”

“We noticed that all of our friends were trying to figure out which team to root for in England,” he said.

He cited several reasons for the fetish for English soccer in particular: the Premier League’s ubiquity on television, the lack of a language barrier. And, of course, there is garden-variety Anglophilia.

Mr. Bennett, for his part, suggested another: the early start of the games in bars.

“You should never underestimate the allure of daytime drinking,” Mr. Bennett said. “If you’re in a bar at 7 in morning with a pint of Guinness, you have a social problem. If you are in a bar at 7 in the morning with that same pint of Guinness and Chelsea is on TV, you’re a football fan.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section E, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Their Game, Now Ours. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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