Pa loves soccer: Converting American soccer fans, one person at a time

Soccer fandom is growing steadily in the United States, in all demographics. Sometimes all it takes to convert a new fan is an enthusiastic ambassador.

Hugo Lloris jumps like a frog.

Often found hopping around in all green, Lloris has been aptly named after the amphibian by my favorite soccer pundit in the world — my girlfriend’s grandfather, Pa.

Pa is a retired man in his mid-60s who moved to Florida last year from our native Ohio, fulfilling his lifelong dream of spending his later years in the Sunshine State. For approximately eight months, he has been a Tottenham supporter and all-around soccer aficionado, and his knowledge of the game has manifested in many insightful observations, including but not limited to Lloris’s frog-like characteristics.

This is what soccer in America looks like.

I was raised with soccer. My dad played when he was in high school in the 1970s, and he helped coach the women’s soccer team at his college while he was a student there. He later became an assistant at a nearby Division III school in the years before I was born. He raised my brother and me to both play the game, and it has been with us forever.

I was fortunate to grow up in a neighborhood that embraced soccer, but I was still in the United States. In the 2000s, soccer was mostly looked at by Americans with a sneer — it was derided as a ‘girl’s sport’ and somehow un-American, especially because of its otherwise-international adoption — and it was impossible to escape these perspectives. If you told someone who didn’t like soccer that you did, and especially if you told them that you played, you were inundated with complaints of flopping, prima donna behavior, and unprovoked assertions of the superior manliness of American football.

This perspective has softened a great deal over the last 20 years, but it’s still not too hard to find, particularly among older folks.

My girlfriend barely grew up with sports in her life. She watched some Steelers through the years with her father and had a small rivalry with her Browns-supporting Pa, but that was it. I made it clear early on when we met that she would have to at least give all of my sports a chance. Ideally, something would stick. If not, so be it, but I wanted her to try for me.

Basketball didn’t do much for her. Hockey was okay. But soccer grabbed her.

The beauty, the technique, the history — within months, she was as enthralled with the game as my brother and me. The wonder of Heung-min Son captured her attention, and she was drawn to Tottenham. She has watched nearly every Spurs game since and began a years-long project of painting every Premier League crest on canvases and hanging them in our basement to create a live table. A few times every season, we go to a soccer bar about 15 minutes from where we live before the first game kicks off at 7:30 a.m. while the kitchen isn’t even open yet, then spend the next seven hours watching, drinking, and talking tekkers with other patrons.

So, yeah, she’s a fan.

For years, she explained to Pa the joy she gets from soccer, and for years, he made jokes to us about it. Nothing sinister, but clearly engaging in the old-school mindset about the sport. We tried a few times, but we could never convince him to give it a chance. The man loves sports, but soccer was too far.

Who knew all it would take was a Dutch man named Steven to show him the way?

When Pa fell in love with soccer

My girlfriend went south to visit her grandparents in January, the busiest time of the year in English football. We generally spend our weekend mornings watching games, often with several screens carrying congruently-timed contests. She wasn’t about to skip out.

While she flew to Florida, Tottenham played a game at Leicester City, an important one for Spurs. It was more than a month into Antonio Conte’s tenure, and he had the club moving in a more positive direction relative to the first three months of the campaign. Tottenham had been as low as 11th earlier in the season but was in seventh heading into the Leicester match.

She instructed Pa to record the game in advance and insisted on watching as soon as he brought her back from the airport. She also insisted he watch the game with her — she came all the way down to see him, the least he could do was share something that’s special to her. After a jab or two, he agreed.

At the kickoff, he was more interested in his phone than the game. When Patson Daka scored in the 24th minute, he comforted his granddaughter but remained unaffected. When Harry Kane brought Spurs level a handful of minutes before the break, he began to spend more time looking up and less time looking down. More action came in the second half, and by the time James Maddison slotted one in the corner to give the Foxes a 2-1 advantage, he was shaking his head at the lot Spurs had found itself in.

With nothing to lose, Conte subbed on Steven Bergwijn for Sergio Regulion in the 79th minute, bringing on the attacking Dutchman for a defensive player. In the 94th minute, Bergwijn was issued a yellow card. It looked like Pa’s first soccer game would end in typical Spurs letdown fashion.

One minute later, Pierre-Emrick Hoiberg hoisted a hopeful ball into the 18 from near midfield. Chaos ensued, and Bergwijn found himself perfectly placed to volley the loose change into the collection box. It was 2-2 at the death — Tottenham had salvaged something from the game, and my girlfriend celebrated while Pa was taken aback by the theater that had unfolded before him.

Leicester restarted the game and quickly turned it over in the midfield. Two passes later, Bergwijn was racing by Leicester’s Caglar Soyuncu with only the keeper to beat. With one touch around him, he created an angle and pushed the ball off the opposite post and into the goal, collapsing Leicester players and prompting mad celebrations in North London and central Florida.

“I didn’t know that could happen!” he exclaimed to his granddaughter as they drank in the scenes.

Pa watched the rest of that matchweek’s action with my girlfriend, fully engaged and eager to soak up information on his new favorite sport. He experienced Southampton hold Manchester City to a clean sheet in a great example of how exciting a 0-0 game can be, and he saw Josh Sargent score perhaps the most spectacular goal of his career against Watford.

The drama grabbed hold of him. Eight months later, it has yet to loosen its grip.

In the months since Bergwijn’s heroics, my girlfriend and her Pa have made it a weekly ritual to text and call during Spurs games. He and I have had many a discussion about the merit of certain yellow cards and what Tottenham needs to do to “put the dang ball in there.” It didn’t take long for him to notice that Lloris generally covers himself in frog-inspired attire, and he knows that Kane is a different player when the midfield gives him the support he needs and allows him to play further up the pitch. As I said, he’s my favorite soccer pundit in the world — nothing gets by this guy.

From the outside looking in, it has been wonderful. My girlfriend has always been close with her grandfather, and this has provided their relationship with another layer with which to grow and flourish. It’s been a joy to see his knowledge of the game grow, from originally not knowing the positions to now understanding why Conte prefers his 3-5-2 formation. He’s tried to convince his anti-soccer brother to give it a shot, and he’s in so deep, that he’s playing Fantasy Premier League with us this coming season.

But selfishly, there’s another reason why I’ve loved being a part of Pa’s soccer transformation — soccer is winning.

It took a long time, but soccer is on an upward trajectory in America with too much momentum to be stopped. MLS is reaching new heights, Premier League viewership is through the roof, and the general population views the game with significantly less disdain than just a couple of decades ago. It is nothing like it was when I was a kid, let alone when my dad was a kid.

Soccer remains unpopular among older Americans in particular, with 62 percent of Americans aged 65+ having no interest at all in the beautiful game, according to a 2020 study from Statista Research Department. Even among those aged 18-29, the study reported that 47 percent of Americans have no interest at all in soccer. There is plenty of room to grow.

My girlfriend and I are doing our part. We have converted one American in the 65+ demographic to change his answer from “not interested at all” to “very interested” in just one game. All it took was one of the best late-game comebacks I’ve ever seen in all my years of soccer watching and playing.

Thank you, Antonio Conte, for bringing on Steven Bergwijn late in that game. Thank you, Steven Bergwijn, for providing my girlfriend with an unforgettable moment with her grandfather and for opening the door to a beautiful new side of the bond we can both share with him.

Most importantly, thank you, Pa, for having an open mind at a time when so many are closed.