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The essential guide to world soccer-the history, the players, the fan culture-from the phenomenally popular duo from NBC Sports.

The Men in Blazers are two English-born, soccer-obsessed broadcasters who have savored the dizzying growth of the game along with millions of Americans. Now they immerse fans and novices alike in the history and culture of the world´s game with Encyclopedia Blazertannica. Examining fan culture, from the famous stadium chants to the tactical variations of scarf tying, exploring the complex physics and ethics of both celebratory knee slides and fights between players, reliving the careers of legendary players, classic matches, and colorful World Cup history, and sharing a deep appreciation for the athletic brilliance and ill-judged neck tattoos that dominate the sport, this indispensable tome gives readers a front-row seat to all the action of football madness.

A New York Times Bestseller!

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Introduction

Hail! Unfortunate Accidental Readers and Great Friends of the Pod.

The volume you have in your hands was designed to be many things:

1. The final nail in the coffin of the long-floundering publishing industry.
2. Living proof that it is possible to write a worse book than Does God Love Michael´s Two Daddies? by Sheila K. Butt.
3. An ill-advised attempt to journey into the inky dark, unexplored depths of the Men in Blazers universe, every detail of which we have created hand in hand with our masochistically loyal listeners over the past eight years, pod by pod, show by show, tweet by suboptimal tweet.

To achieve the first two objectives, we chose to focus solely on the third. This task demanded we wallow in the history and culture of football, the sport we both love. With its pantheon of heroes and villains, moments of glorious ecstasy and searing despair, dodgy haircuts and surplus neck tattoos, it has empowered us to experience emotions other people seem to feel in real life, to which we are both inured. No telenovela could provide soapier story lines to keep us hooked like football . . . a game with plot points that unfurl live without a safety net, as the whole world watches.

Witnessing the game we love grow and grow in America, the nation that we love, has been the thrill of our lifetimes. We both arrived on these shores as innocents, equipped with full heads of our own hair, in the early 1990s. Back then soccer had seemingly forever been cast as America´s "Sport of the Future," its recent past little more than a collection of false dawns and hyperbolic predictions that it was about to become the Next Big Thing.

We well remember the day when FIFA announced its intention to host the 1994 World Cup in the US, prompting panicked former-AFL-quarterback-turned-US-representative Jack Kemp to declare on the floor of Congress: "I think it is important for all those young men out there who someday hope to play real football where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism whereas soccer is a European socialist sport."

Yet, slow and steady wins the race. We have watched with wonder, World Cup to World Cup, as the game´s profile has inexorably risen to the point that the sport´s profile has taken its place alongside seersucker, cheesesteaks, and the collected works of Raymond Carver as a symbol of American freedom and democracy.

Indeed, our obsessive love of football and Men in Blazers´ very existence has been possible only because it was powered and reinforced by that surging rise of interest, as well as by the fact that you allow bald men on television in the United States.

The question is often asked as to why, season to season, week to week, game to game, more and more Americans have fallen under football´s poetic sway. Many theories have been advanced. Just as baseball thrived in "the Golden Age of Radio," and the NFL was the perfect televisual sport, soccer´s rise has been driven by the Internet in general, and EA Sports FIFA in particular, which have enabled fans in Los Angeles or North Dakota to experience and follow their teams as closely as supporters in Leicester or Newcastle.

Also, alcohol. If a gent is in a bar drinking a beer at 7:30 in the morning, society deems him to be an alcoholic. If Liverpool are losing to Bournemouth on a television in that very same bar whilst that afore- mentioned beer is being quaffed, we consider that man an American soccer fan. If we have learned only one thing during our Guinness-stained Men in Blazers odyssey it is this: Never underestimate the extent to which Americans adore an excuse to drink during the daytime.

Ultimately, we like to believe football´s American boom has been made possible by a realization that sporting audiences

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