“A strange feature of American exceptionalism during the 1980s and ’90s was that we wanted to import everything but culture. This is one way to understand the bizarre anxiety and contempt with which much of the American sports media regarded soccer in the late 20th century: It was the wrong kind of product. … American men in Bangladesh-made khakis could, without a whisper of cognitive dissonance, drive their German cars while listening to their Chinese-engineered radio consoles, where they’d spend drivetime deriding soccer as a foreign menace, a cosmopolitan threat to American strength—a ‘game for beret-wearers,’ as Ann Coulter once put it. …”
The Ringer
The Ringer: The Death of the American Soccer Troll – Bryan Curtis (July 2018)

“I. My Magical Connection With the Tiny Italian Soccer Club Pro Vercelli. I have a magical connection with the tiny Italian soccer club Pro Vercelli because I once spent a year pretending to be them in a video game. Moreover, I spent a year blogging extensively about pretending to be them in a video game. Without going too deeply into my reasons for doing this — more or less the usual Internet cocktail of narcissism, a ‘desire to interrogate constructions of fantasy and reality in sports,’ and generally warm feelings about playing Football Manager at two in the afternoon for money — I can say that the project spiraled hopelessly out of control, sucked in hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of words, generated about a million inside jokes on my old soccer site, and left me with a permanent love for this obscure little club from a city of fewer than 50,000 people in the northern Italian province of Piedmont. …”
Grantland (August 23, 2012)
Pro Vercelli: They were one of history’s greatest teams. (2012)

“Pro Vercelli: The End, Or Is It. A new version of Football Manager is released today, which makes this, in my house at least, a time of hushed reflection. The old era is passing away, the new era is rising up before us. Everything we knew and loved is sliding into the sea, while before us, like a mountainous country, is thrust a terrifying and exhilarating possibility. Just like every day, really, but the arrival of a new FM makes it that much clearer. Here is the past, there is the future. Eurogamer gave it a 9, but wished more had been done to fix the press conferences. …” Run Of Play – Brian Phillips

“A couple of years back, in the ‘Hey, YouTube exists!’ golden age of let’s call it 2007-10, it got to be a common thing for up-and-coming young soccer stars to release promotional rap videos. I’m talking European rap here, which blasted this trend into a whole other Bad Idea galaxy. You’d get these willowy midfield prodigies, kids who’d just signed their first £30k/week contracts, who’d barely even learned how to downshift their new Maybachs. Then suddenly there they’d be, shyly posturing in front of a studio mic while some mirror-shade-wearing Dutchman called DJ Hogwarts bounced around plaiting his Mennonite beard, nodding on one and three. It was a fascinating era. I miss it.” Grantland – Brian Phillips

“Hello old friend, Now and then I say to myself that time is the wind that blows the seeds of a dandelion. We begin in one place, in a golden flower, but the months and years carry us where they will. Perhaps we land in the sidewalk crack beneath the giant poster for Iron Man 3 near the bench where I am sitting in Manhattan, across from the Qdoba, in the sun, where we put down new roots and flourish. Or perhaps we are blown into an industrial intake fan and chopped into 500 pieces. A lot of things can happen, in time. 🙂 Wenger, Xavi — Wenger never understood this. … Yours affectionately, Pep :)” Grantland – Brian Phillips

Genoa – Pro Vercelli, 0 -1, 1913
“I have a magical connection with the tiny Italian soccer club Pro Vercelli because I once spent a year pretending to be them in a video game. Moreover, I spent a year blogging extensively about pretending to be them in a video game. Without going too deeply into my reasons for doing this — more or less the usual Internet cocktail of narcissism, a ‘desire to interrogate constructions of fantasy and reality in sports,’ and generally warm feelings about playing Football Manager at two in the afternoon for money — I can say that the project spiraled hopelessly out of control, sucked in hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of words, generated about a million inside jokes on my old soccer site, and left me with a permanent love for this obscure little club from a city of fewer than 50,000 people in the northern Italian province of Piedmont.” Grantland – Brian Phillips

Pro Vercelli: They were one of history’s greatest teams
“But by the late 2000s, Pro Vercelli were entrenched in the lower leagues, their glorious past forgotten. Until one day, a man bought a video game. Read the uplifting saga of a small-town Italian club, an unknown American manager, triumph, betrayal, passion, and several extremely good recipes, from start to finish below.” Run of Play

“It’s a short career, sports superstardom, which means that the world accumulates ex-great athletes at a fairly remarkable pace, one a year at least, as if time itself were an aging athlete out fielding fly balls — Elway, Sampras, Shaq, Ronaldo, thunk, thunk, thunk. At any given moment there’s a significant population of ex-sports superstars milling around in the weird background of culture, the part that’s half after-party and half wax museum. You could throw a dinner for them, the living retired great athletes, and fill a pretty good-sized hall. I’m picturing Yogi Berra trading fake punches with Muhammad Ali, MJ smoking scornfully in the corner booth. Maradona face-down in a cake.” Grantland – Brian Phillips

“Because he looks ridiculous, is a streaky player, has pixie cheekbones despite being 6-foot-7, reads as ‘posh’ and ‘soft’ in a sport that complicatedly worships killers with no nerves in their knuckles, has a sense of humor, is married to a woman who is noticeably hotter than he is, and tends to be photographed in the process of transforming himself into comedic aerial hieroglyphs — e.g., this, and this and this — Peter Crouch gets a bad rap. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that Peter Crouch is not often judged with the benefit of nuance.” Grantland (Video)

“Harry Johnston was an outstanding defender who played nearly twenty years for Blackpool, mostly as a center-back. He was so good that in 1951 the FA named him footballer of the year. He played for his country as well, making his last appearance in 1953, at Wembley, against the upstart Magyars from Hungary, but that would not be a good day for Harry. The problem was Nándor Hidegkuti.” Run of Play

“Around 11 p.m. last Monday, Caleb Porter was wearing a pained, tight expression, like a man who’d elaborately prepared an orange for eating – peeled it, scraped its white resins off the delicate inner skin, sectioned it; perhaps opened a beverage suitable for the side; sat himself somewhere comfortable, with entertainment, orange and beverage at hand – only to find that the orange was not an orange all along, but was instead an artistic evocation of one’s career hopes vanishing forever, and so every choice thereby proved wrong in that moment. No orange, but an orange-suitable entertainment. And orange-suitable beverage! But no orange. His expression pained and tight. In short, a man in crisis.” Run of Play