football (n.): a game played by two teams of eleven players each in which a round ball is advanced towards a goal using any part of the body other than the hands and arms

Several weeks ago, I talked my good buddy Jeremy into purchasing FIFA 2008 for the XBox 360.  It’s a state of the art soccer game with gorgeous graphics, innovative ball-handling controls, and a sensitivity to the unique timing aspects of soccer that make it unlike the other sports games that are more or less the same idea (basketball, hockey, etc.). 

I’ve had an on-again-off-again love affair with soccer as a spectator sport since 1998, when the World Cup coincided with a summer I spent with a shit-ton of Europeans at a nerd camp at Haverford College.  Everyone I liked at this otherwise uninspiring camp lived and died for the World Cup, so I let myself get swept up in the action and found I quite enjoyed watching — much more than I ever enjoyed playing.  Soccer players are fast in the way that no American athletes are fast.  Soccer players control the ball in ways that look cool even if you don’t have an appreciation for their difficulty.  Soccer players pass to one another with an uncanny field awareness that suggests telepathy.  And yeah, it’s low-scoring, but when there is a goal, holy fucking shit.

My interest in soccer has waxed and waned — I happened to be in Italy in part of the summer of 2006, so I was pretty into it then, for obvious reasons.  But playing horrifyingly long hours of FIFA 2008 has reignited my passion for the beautiful game in a whole new way.  Jeremy and I play match after match after match with him as Chelsea F.C. and me as Manchester United, and the end result is that I’ve started paying an unseemly amount of attention to English football.

Did you know Time-Warner Cable carries the Fox Soccer Channel?  Did you know you can set your cable box to DVR a live sporting event?  I learned both of these things recently and treated myself to the Barnsley-Chelsea match that aired Saturday.  This match was one of several from the quarterfinal round of the FA Cup, and it was a shocking upset — a mere Championship team defeated a Premier team!

What the fuck am I talking about?  Let me give you a little backstory — it’s worth it, I promise.  The major league of soccer in England is called the Premiership.  Any English soccer team you’ve ever heard of plays in the Premiership: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, etc.  Below the Premiership is a system of less prestigious leagues, including, in descending order, the Championship, League One, and League Two.  Based on their performance, teams are promoted and demoted between these divisions and the Premiership.

Below that are non-league soccer clubs.  The top tier of these non-league clubs comprises a national division of pro teams and the lower tiers include regional divisions of semi-pro and amateur teams, which tend to have very small followings in very small towns.

The FA Cup is an annual tournament in England that just about any team at any level can enter.  There are qualifying rounds for the legion of lower-level teams, but in the “rounds proper,” all the teams, from top-flight Premiership teams down to regional nobodies, play games based on a random draw.  Thus any two teams can face each other.  On January 26, Liverpool F.C. played Havant & Waterlooville F.C.  This is roughly the equivalent of the Boston Red Sox playing the Texas Instruments company softball team.

Chelsea won last year’s FA Cup and finished second in the Premiership league.  Barnsley finished 20th out of 24 in last year’s second-level Championship league.  But Barnsley played a scrappy, never-say-die match and won on a beautiful header goal in the 66th minute.  The excitement in the arena was palpable even on TV — it was like watching a major league team lose to its own AAA franchise.  You don’t see that kind of stunning, staggering thing in American sports — at least, I certainly never have.