How to Pick a Premier League Team You Will Still Support in Ten Years

The most common American approach is to check who won last year and pick them. The instinct comes from a reasonable place: in American sports the good franchise is usually good again next year, because the draft and the salary cap drag everyone back toward the middle. English football has neither. No cap, no draft, and a shared broadcast pot that the biggest clubs already dwarf with their own commercial income.

You would think that makes champions more stable, and over five years it often does. But football dynasties end abruptly rather than gradually. A manager leaves, three players age at once, an owner sells. Manchester United FC is the standing example in both directions: twenty-six years without a league title before 1993, then a great many of them, then another long stretch with none. The badge never changed. The trophies did.

The real problem is not the decline. It is that winning was your entire reason, so when it stops you have nothing holding you there. Fandom is mostly a habit of attention, and attention needs a better anchor than a result you did not contribute to.

If anyone in your family has a club, take it. This is the strongest option available and most Americans skip past it because it feels like it does not count. A great-grandfather from Merseyside, an uncle stationed near Birmingham, a cousin in London with a thirty-year season ticket — any of these beats a club you reasoned your way into, because it arrives attached to a person who will talk to you about it at 8:40 on a Saturday morning.

If nobody hands you one, take a place instead: a city you studied in, the town your last name comes from, the neighborhood where you walked past a stadium on the way to dinner. A place gives you an endless supply of things to care about beyond results — why the derby is the derby, which is almost always an old argument about industry or religion. The tie should be at least slightly real, though. A region that turned up on a DNA test is not a connection, it is a story you are hoping becomes one.

Adopting the club of a player you love works better than its reputation suggests. A player gives you a reason to watch one specific match this weekend, which is the actual bottleneck for a new fan. Nobody falls for a league in the abstract. They fall for one person doing something absurd with a football, and then stay for everything around him.

The risk is obvious: players leave. Contracts run three to five years, the transfer window opens twice a season, and nothing like a franchise tag exists to hold anyone in place. Your guy will be sold, possibly in your second year. This is where most player-based fandoms quietly die, and it is entirely predictable, so plan for it.

The plan is to use the player as a door, not as the house. In your first eighteen months, deliberately build attachments that do not depend on him: two other players you enjoy watching, a rival you enjoy disliking, the songs and why they exist. Do that and the transfer is a sad Thursday. Skip it and you will follow him to the next club, and the one after that, and end up with a hundred matches watched and no team.

This is the criterion nobody mentions and everybody should. You are choosing a club in a country five hours ahead of the American East Coast, and the fixture list decides how much of your fandom actually happens. England schedules its football in the American morning, which is the good news. The complication is that not every club gets the same slots.

Broadcasters move the clubs with the largest audiences, so a big club plays a lot of Saturday lunchtime and Sunday afternoon fixtures, which land early and comfortably in the United States. A smaller club plays far more often at the traditional Saturday 3pm slot — 10am Eastern, 7am Pacific. Big clubs also play midweek in European competition, and those kick off in the middle of an American workday.

7:30am

Eastern for a Saturday lunchtime kickoff

10am

Eastern for the traditional Saturday 3pm slot

5 hrs

the standing gap between England and Eastern time

Be realistic about your own week before committing. If Saturday mornings already belong to small children, a club whose matches land at 7:30am Eastern is a gift rather than a burden. On Pacific time, a 3pm English kickoff means a 7am alarm every weekend.

Here is the argument almost nobody makes to a new American fan: the best experience in English football is not at the top. Supporting a giant means most matches are ones you are expected to win, so a victory is relief and a defeat is a crisis. That is a strange emotional deal to sign up for voluntarily. A club outside the elite gets to have good days that simply feel good.

Going further down is better value still. The second tier plays 46 matches and settles its final promotion place with a playoff, and English football keeps a long memory of small clubs doing enormous things — Nottingham Forest won back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980, and Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016 as a 5000-to-1 outsider. Those are the stories that make an early alarm worth setting.

• Tickets are actually obtainable if you ever make the trip, which is not true at the biggest clubs.
• The supporter culture is warmer and less corporate, online and in the stands.
• You learn the whole squad in a month, because there are fewer names and less turnover.
• A cup run against a giant becomes the highlight of your year rather than a scheduling nuisance.
• You will be one of very few Americans supporting them, which is its own quiet pleasure.

At some point someone will tell you your club does not count. Usually this means you picked a big one, you picked it recently, and you have never been to the stadium. The accusation is called glory hunting, and it comes from somewhere real: in England, supporting your local club is loyalty to where you are from, and that club is frequently not very good.

It mostly does not matter, for two reasons. The standard is unmeetable by definition — you cannot retroactively be born in Sunderland — and almost nobody actually applies it. Fans who care about their club are overwhelmingly delighted that someone in Ohio watched a 1-1 draw at half past seven in the morning. What earns respect is not birthplace but consistency: watch the bad matches, learn the players who are not famous, and do not vanish during a bad run.

You do not get to choose where you were born. You do get to choose whether you show up in February.

Choosing is the small part. A club becomes yours through repetition, and the first season decides whether it takes. What you are building is a weekly appointment that survives a dull 0-0 in November, and that takes about three months of deliberate effort before it runs on its own.

1. 1

   Put the fixtures in your calendar

   All of them, converted to your own time zone, for the whole season. A fandom that depends on remembering to check will not last past October.

2. 2

   Watch full matches, not highlights

   Highlights teach you goals. Full matches teach you players, patterns, and why the crowd groaned at a sideways pass.

3. 3

   Find the supporters bar

   Most clubs of any size have a supporters group in American cities, meeting at a bar that opens absurdly early. One morning there beats a season alone on the couch.

4. 4

   Learn one rival properly

   Knowing exactly who you are meant to dislike, and why, is a surprisingly large share of the whole experience. Read the history of the derby.

One last thing. Watching a great deal of football produces an urge to play some, usually around the seventieth minute of a match you are not enjoying. Pickup Soccer lists free games near you when that happens — share a ZIP code and RSVP in one tap.