Anyone who’s watched soccer live in the United States will be familiar with him: the English fan, always a male, who’s tediously insistent that by right of birth he knows more than anyone else on the face of the earth about the sport.
Lurching up from the bar or dropping into the group chat at the invitation of some naive administrator, he’ll never miss a moment to remind everyone that the league leaders have benefited from an easy run, that Ben White’s haircut should be the real talking point of the Premier League title race so far, that football has laws rather than rules, that many Manchester United fans are not from Manchester (this point must be emphasized with a grim relentlessness), that pre-relegation early 2000s West Ham was way better than the Moyesian vintage, that Graham Potter is better than Ange Postecoglou, that Seaman and James were better than Alisson and Ederson, that “actually, Chelsea’s back four in the 1998 Winners’ Cup was the best that English football has ever seen”.
