“In the back room of the threadbare offices of the Irish soccer team Bohemians, the printer clunks and chugs and whirs incessantly, spitting out a cascade of shipping labels. Some of the addresses bear the names of nearby Dublin streets. Others are from farther afield: across Ireland, across the Irish Sea, across the Atlantic. Each label will be affixed to a package containing a Bohemians jersey. And these days, the club sells a lot of jerseys. The appeal is not rooted in any of the traditional drivers of soccer’s merchandise market: success, glamour, a beloved star player. Daniel Lambert, the club’s chief operating officer, loves both Bohemians and the League of Ireland, the competition in which it plays, but he is under no illusions about the reality of either. ‘We’re a small team in a poor league,’ he said. Instead, fans are drawn to Bohemians by the jerseys themselves; or, rather, what the jerseys say, both about the team and the customer. …”
NY Times

“As far as the man in the food truck is concerned, the patch of land he occupies in Sheffield, England, is about as humdrum as they come. To him, the spot — in the drab parking lot of a sprawling home improvement superstore, its facade plastered in lurid orange — is not exactly a place where history comes alive. John Wilson, an academic at the University of Sheffield’s management school, looks at the same site and can barely contain his excitement. This, he said, is one of the places where the world’s most popular sport was born. He does not see a parking lot. He can see the history: the verdant grass, the sweating players, the cheering crowds. …”
NY Times