Chapter M, Men in Blazers Present Encyclopedia Blazertannica

Making It in America: The tag line of Men in Blazers has always been “Soccer. America’s Sport of the Future…as it has been since 1972.” A slogan inspired by a pennant Rog bought off eBay that now hangs in our panic room, which proclaims “Soccer! America’s Sport of the Eighties.” Polls, though, show the sport is well and truly entrenched in the American firmament. The Luker-ESPN Sports Poll has determined soccer is America’s second most popular sport for those aged twelve to twenty-four, outstripping college football, MLB, and even the NBA. The question then is—just when did the sport “make it”? We asked some of our friends to weigh in:

It is so damn hard to select just one moment. World Cup ’94 lit the fire. The Women’s World Cup in 1999 was such a party, it left folks wanting more. The memories of Americans adjusting their time clocks to watch the US at World Cup 2002 in South Korea/Japan will long resonate, as will the moments when we shocked traditional world powers Portugal and Mexico, but if a gun was put to my head and one moment demanded, I would choose when the Real American, Landon Donovan, scored in the 91st minute against Algeria in 2010, moving us into the knockout stages. It resonated deeper and wider than any moment. The YouTube video of the bar in Omaha. OMAHA!! erupting after that goal, still gives me goosebumps, and I watch it several times a year.

Back in the day it was 1999 Women’s World Cup final when I left the production truck for a last bathroom break before kickoff and took a peek inside the Rose Bowl to see 90,000 spectators inside the stadium for—shock! Horror!—a soccer game in America…and more than that, a women’s soccer game. Then it went away again, as it did after the US run in 2002, but somewhere between Landon’s goal in 2010 and Abby Wambach’s 2011 strike against Brazil it all became real.

Two thousand fifteen when I went to watch a high school soccer game and there was a kid on the side in a Burnley shirt.

When they announced the creation of MLS I thought we had made it. I had already been in love with soccer for a long time, watching Italian Serie A and English football on the weekends, mostly in a different language. I was too young for the NASL so in my mind the sport had always been an import. As much as I dreamed of being a professional soccer player one day while watching Roberto Donadoni each weekend, it was the birth of our very own league that made that dream feel real. I sat in awe of that first game when Eric Wynalda cut the ball back and curled it in the corner. In my mind the sport had arrived.

I never knew that we had “made it.” Fact is, we haven’t made it yet, and I have no idea what it will look like when we do. But I kind of like it that way.

When Landon Donovan scored his last-gasp winner against Algeria at the 2010 World Cup, I had no one to celebrate with. I was working for ESPN in a Johannesburg studio, surrounded by Englishmen who were more absorbed in England-Slovenia, which was taking place at the same time. When Donovan scored, I ran screaming around the studio with my arms stretched high, but I got blank looks from everyone around me.

Several hours later, I returned to the hotel. I started finding all the reactions from viewing parties, bars, and living rooms online. I had known people were watching back home, but the volume and intensity of the passion erupting coast to coast across the nation was overwhelming. I sat in my room and watched video after video after video, as tears trickled down my face. That’s when I knew soccer had made it in America.

Managerial Fashion: In the 1970s, managers could pretty much be broken down into two categories: those who wore suits on the sideline, with the overall panache of undertakers, with a few wideboys who dared to dress like flash secondhand-car salesmen, and those who steadfastly committed to the tracksuit. We often wondered what the difference was between the two. Common wisdom had it that the suit suggested that the manager showered in his own private changing room, while the tracksuit meant the gaffer washed up with his players in their giant, communal bathtub.

Like so much in modern football, all that has changed. A Premier League manager need not only be master motivator, tactician, sports scientist, and media handler. More important than his ability to field a team who can attack and defend is his signature style. Thus, it is impossible to think of Roberto Mancini without mentally conjuring his trademark scarf. Brendan Rodgers triggers thoughts of a man clad all in black like a poorly executed Johnny Cash waxwork. Arsène Wenger, a normcore sleeping-bag anorak; Tim Sherwood, his gilet; Tony Pulis and his devotion to Run-DMC–era shell-suits. José Mourinho and his flip-flop between Armani blazers (against mediocre teams) and training sweats as if he has just rolled out of bed (for big games, to show he could not care less about the opposition).

A GFOP, Jesse Dorsey once wrote with the observation that every Premier League manager fits into one of three categories:

Boxers: Big Sam Allardyce, Steve Bruce, Sean Dyche, Ronald Koeman, Craig Shakespeare, Slaven Bilic.

F1 Drivers: José Mourinho, Antonio Conte, Mark Hughes, Mauricio Pochettino, Tony Pulis, Marco Silva, Mauricio Pellegrino, Pep Guardiola, Brendan Rodgers (nose of a boxer, ego of an F1 driver).

Composers: Arsène Wenger, Manuel Pellegrini, Louis van Gaal, Jurgen Klopp, David Wagner.

We were once asked to think about what our signature motif would be were we to move into the upper echelons of football management. Davo believed he would dress as a schoolboy, replete with shorts and school cap. Rog favored a flower boutonniere, tweed blazer, mesh tank top, and sunglasses.

Every Premier League manager can be classified into one of three categories: boxer, Formula 1 driver, or seventeenth-century composer.

Man Bun: A favorite hairstyle amongst footballers and style trap that proves God has a sense of humor. Although thousands of men who have been influenced to grow their hair to Jared Leto lengths yank up their hair into a pony, scientists have discovered that the very act of pulling your hair tightly along the hairline can cause “traction alopecia,” aka baldness.

An inspirational can-do story of triumph and self-improvement. For so long the Roger Clinton to United’s Bill. The little brother transformed itself from longtime self-sabotaging laughingstock to “Noisy Neighbor” to World Power. All it took was an unprecedented investment from the Abu Dhabi royal family, who were looking for a platform to promote their region on the global stage and realized there is no communication system more powerful than Premier League football. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan bin Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan acquired the team in 2008 and pumped over a billion dollars into it, transforming the once hapless City into potent, rippled title winners by 2012—an extreme makeover even Charles Atlas would have found startling.

In any other realm, such a radical identity shift could be problematic—especially for supporters whose identity had been wrapped up in the club’s tradition of being lovable losers. Yet football fandom is an emotional realm rather than a rational one where cognitive dissonance reigns supreme. Super-fan Noel Gallagher came onto our show and talked about the decades he followed the oft-slumping club around England and the delight he experienced in failure after failure. When asked if it was hard for him to savor the sudden, petro-dollar-fueled turnaround in the club’s fortunes, he did not have to wait a second before replying, “Because we went so long and we went down so deep and low, it’s like we’d all earned it.”

The gold standard amongst English football teams: a juggernaut that rode unparalleled success on the field to financial nirvana off it. The club were beneficiaries of good timing. Until the 1980s, English football was run by an innocuous assortment of local businessmen who demonstrated a distinct lack of national ambition. Their financial model amounted to little more than “putting bums on seats” for home games. The creation of the English Premier League in 1992 changed everything, triggering a gluttonous gold rush. Some of the most sophisticated global sports business minds poured into English football to exploit the new frontiers of domestic, international, and digital rights, and the exploding universe of commercial opportunities.

No club seized the moment more than Manchester United. Their legendary coach Sir Alex Ferguson delivered title after title, empowering their commercial department to forge global partnerships across the world. No other team has such a dizzying array of money-spinning relationships. Cue photos of their sullen players standing in front of shiny machinery made by the club’s official diesel engine partner, “Yanmar of Osaka,” or cans of chips made by official savory snack partner, “Mr. Potato.”

Under the ownership of the Florida-based Glazer family, Manchester United has achieved a status no other English club can dream of. First, they were reclassified as an “emerging growth company” registered in the Cayman Islands. Then, the Old Trafford club became the ticker symbol MANU, traded on New York’s Big Board. For their board, that is ultimately the only table that matters. And because of that, I never root for Manchester United. Even if they were playing against an all-Evil starting eleven featuring Hitler in goal, Vlad the Impaler and Ivan the Terrible at center back, and Pol Pot at striker, I would root for Evil. —RB

Maradona, Diego: Few have used a World Cup as a platform to enthrall the planet. Fewer still have used the tournament to self-destruct and sully their own name. No man has done both to such radical extremes as Diego Armando Maradona, the Argentine icon who, in a career of excess, utilized the World Cup as the stage for both his greatest triumph and shattering humiliation.

In 1986, the strutting Number 10 delivered the single most virtuoso performance a World Cup has ever witnessed, inspiring an otherwise unexceptional Argentine team to victory. Just eight years later, El Diego tested positive for ephedrine doping (or fell victim to his thirst for an innocent energy drink called Ripped Fuel, depending on whether you believe FIFA or the player himself) flaming out mid-tournament, a theatrical exit bettered only marginally by Tony Montana at the end of Scarface.

Maradona’s career was always built on brilliance, blurred boundaries, and spectacular overindulgence. Squat, impudent, and omnipotent, the player was part urchin, part prince. As he was just five foot five, his low center of gravity made him one of the greatest dribblers in the game. A French broadcaster described the player’s inimitable control by suggesting his “foot was more like the paw of a cat.” Almost impossible to knock off the ball, Maradona knew his opponents would attempt to boot him off the field, yet he would always quickly dust himself off and demand the ball again, drawing strength from the knowledge he was draining defenders of their energy.

Maradona’s 1986 campaign is oft celebrated, and for good reason. The firestarter propelled his team to winning the Cup by all means necessary. In a roiling quarter final against the English, played at the Azteca in the shadows of the Falklands conflict, Maradona scored twice to seal a 2–1 victory. The first goal, when he used his left fist to reach over a six-foot-one goalkeeper and punch the ball into the net, became known as the “Hand of God” in Argentina. In England, it was referred to as the “Hand of the Devil.”

Four minutes later, while the English were still reeling, he scored a goal that even a deity would struggle to replicate. A spectacular 60-meter display of the Gambetta, the Argentine art of dribbling, past six England players, the last two of whom desperately tried to take out the man rather than the ball. After witnessing the feat, the startled Argentine commentator proclaimed, “Good God! Long live football! Cosmic Kite! What planet do you come from?”

1986. The true end of the Empire.

In 1994, the little warhorse prepared to drag his tattered body into battle one more time, aged thirty-three. His fourth World Cup would begin against Greece at Foxboro Stadium. A light aircraft buzzed above the field, pulling a banner that proclaimed “Maradona—Prima Donna” ahead of the game, and the star lived up to his billing. In the 60th minute of the 4–0 victory, Diego received the ball in the box, jinked to his left, and rifled the ball into the top corner, then celebrated the achievement in hopped-up style, grabbing a sideline television camera and pressing his maniacal mug against it. Tight-lipped after the game, Maradona would only declare, “I’m letting my actions speak for themselves.”

Four days later, the player was selected for random drug testing after a 2–1 win against Nigeria. FIFA quickly announced the Argentine had tested positive for five variants of ephedrine, an ingredient of over-the-counter cold medicines. “Maradona must have taken a cocktail of drugs because the five identified substances are not found in one medicine,” said Dr. Michel d’Hooghe, a member of FIFA’s executive committee. The Guardian would later note the way Maradona had celebrated his goal against Greece was as conclusive as any drug test, “Broadcast around the world, his contorted features made him look like a lunatic, flying on a cocktail of adrenalin and every recreational drug known to man.”

Men in Blazers, Naming of: When Rog and I simultaneously went on Sirius XM radio and Grantland in 2012, we needed a name and without any hesitation I immediately suggested Men in Blazers:

2. We love suits and ties and overdressing of all sorts. Rog enjoys hats. I enjoy handkerchiefs and tie clips. We both appreciate blazers. Though Rog is way more into tweed than me. Or any man.

3. When we first came to the US, everyone who was allowed on television to talk about sport was wearing a blazer with a logo on it, usually of the league they were broadcasting or the network they were broadcasting on.

So without any conversation that I remember, we knew exactly what to do. We hired a designer to design a blazer patch and a Latin scholar to translate “Men in Blazers” into that dead, poetic language. Slight hitch, though the Romans were very good at building straight roads, slaughtering Visigoths, and sorting things into groups of 10 and 100, they had horrible fashion sense and had completely failed to invent the blazer, or a word for “blazer” before their language died. So we opted for “Viri Recte Vestiti” instead. “Men Correctly Dressed.” And despite my penchant for wearing my blazer and tie with shorts or knee-length joggers, and always with Adi Stan Smiths, we are “Recte Vestiti” at most times. —MD

Men in Blazers National Team: In 2013, San Marino played England in World Cup qualifying. La Serenissima (The Serene Ones) then ranked 207th in FIFA’s national rankings, were thrashed 8–0. Yet it was not their football that caught our eye. It was their footballers. Whilst the English team included such glamorous global stars as Wayne Rooney, Joe Hart, and Frank Lampard, the enclaved microstate fielded a squad of players who had to finish their day jobs before pulling on their national team’s jerseys. Goalkeeper Aldo Simoncini was a practicing accountant. The defense included two bank clerks and a bar owner. The midfield was bossed by Matteo Coppini, an olive oil manufacturer, and one of two professional squad members, Andy Selva, led the attack. The thirty-six-year-old plied his trade for Fidene in Italy’s fifth tier.

The jock tag on the bottom right of the jersey

Few international teams could make the case they work harder. Yet most of San Marino’s work takes place off the field. However, their endeavor and truly amateur status was heartwarming, and we began to wonder what America’s best amateur national team would look like. The Men in Blazers National Team was born to make that notion real. Within a week, over 4,000 listeners submitted their case to make the squad. Résumés from Butcher/Goalkeepers, Fireman/Midfielders, and Zookeeper/Strikers flooded in. Warren Barton bravely agreed to act as coach. A fax was fired off to San Marino’s Football Association. Crickets ensued. The fax was resent. A subsequent version was dispatched to Gibraltar. We are yet to hear back. Thanks to Adidas, we have since developed a National Team kit—the world’s first tweed football jersey—so we are ready.

World’s first tweed football jersey

One of America’s least appreciated footballing heroes. A be-mulleted pioneer. A man who invested his passion and energy to build American soccer at a transitional time when it still lived in the shadows.

At a live show we did before the 2014 World Cup, he talked about the bewildering afterglow of USA 1994:

“It was a time of strange choices. We had fame but nowhere to play. I was offered a Hollywood role in a pirate movie and a chance to join the cast of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding off-Broadway.” The goalkeeper even had a stint as a kicker with the Jets. “I went to try out thinking it would just be me and coach Pete Carroll,” he said, “but when I came out of the locker room there were hundreds of TV cameras there. To kick field goals in front of all those cameras was more nerve-wracking than anything I experienced in the World Cup.”

When we asked Meola to describe the legacy of his career, he said something poignant that merits preserving in its entirety. “I met a guy from the 1950 team, Walter Bahr, when I was a kid on the U-19 World Cup squad, and he said, ‘The only thing I want you to do is keep the ball rolling.’ That was his expression, keep the ball rolling. All we did at the 1994 World Cup was push it along. There’s a group of guys just after us that pushed it along, and now it’s Michael Bradley, and Tim Howard, and Clint Dempsey and you know all the names, right? I just hope twenty years from now they’re sitting up here with you guys pushing the ball along, and that for me is the legacy that I hope we left for all of you.”

Mercersburg Academy: Life-changing boarding school in the crap part of Pennsylvania that I attended for the 1984–85 school year on an English Speaking Union Scholarship. I had never been to America before, and when I landed at Dulles Airport I was dumbstruck by the cops with guns, the green freeway signs, the massive Buick that I was picked up in and driven eighty-seven miles northwest to the Maryland-Pennsylvania border and my first visit to a real McDonald’s and contact with real Americans. I ordered a Big Mac with large fries, a Coke, and a vanilla milkshake. And because they couldn’t understand a word I was saying, I ended up with six chicken McNuggets, a black coffee, and an apple pie. I had spent six years longing to attend Mercersburg, ever since my somewhat nerdy brother, William, had returned from the ’burg in the Summer of ’79 with shoulders, beach blond hair, and a strong American accent. He was no longer William. He was now Bill. And I liked Bill so much more.

The very first person I met at Mercersburg was a skinny, almost deranged Puerto Rican student who ran out of the dorm screaming Rolling Stones lyrics at me at the top of his hyperactive lungs. His name was Benicio Del Toro. The real one.

Almost 4,000 miles away from home, the only thing I missed about England was the football scores. I had actually never felt more at home. After spending my first weekend drinking RC Cola, demolishing pepperoni pizza from Romeo’s, listening to go-go music and bingeing on the wonder that was American television—college football, Miami Vice, Saturday Night Live—I resolved to spend the rest of my life in America.

But my greatest discovery in that John Hughes movie of a year at American boarding school was myself. Young Davo. Who I really was, in a country where the assumption was you were going to do great things, and the only question, how and where exactly you were going to do them. My God, I fell in love with America hard that first year. And I have never wavered. —MD

The school that gave us James Stewart, Benicio Del Toro, and Rebecca Lowe

Messi, Lionel: To have watched the modern Barcelona team is to savor Marvel Comic superheroes writ large. Or, more accurately, writ small. In their prime, the Champions League–dominating Catalans possessed one of the shortest squads in football but compensated for their lack of stature with a confidence bordering on the superhuman. First, their miniature stalwarts, Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta, and Xavi Hernández, were bold enough to lacerate opponents through the congested gut of midfield, cocksure their lightning-quick passes and movement meant adversaries could chase only shadows. Once Neymar and Luis Suárez signed up to lead the line alongside Messi for three golden years between 2014 and 2017, the threesome could have legitimately claimed to be the most awe-inspiring trio since the Bee Gees, conjuring a potent, whirling, yet precise brand of soccer previously experienced only on PlayStation consoles.

It is an honor to have been alive to watch this man play.

The team’s success depended on the power of the collective. Yet, despite looking like he just wandered out of a local Supercuts, Lionel Messi has been its undoubted star. Known as Pulga Atómica, the Atomic Flea, the Argentine came to Barcelona at thirteen years of age because the Catalans were willing to cover the cost of a growth hormone treatment he needed at the time. Their investment has paid for itself many times over, as Messi has demonstrated a peerless ability to conjure up moments of magic in the biggest games, savaging opponents by accelerating from the seemingly safe deep waters of midfield, then navigating into a sliver of space between center back and left back with such velocity, it seems, in the poet Eduardo Galeano’s words, “as if he was wearing the ball as a sock.”

Once Messi enters the penalty area, opposing defenders’ sense of confusion becomes palpable. The desperate attempts they make to chase down their quarry will be to no avail. They will pull up lame to avoid clipping the Argentine’s heels, looking on in panic and praying their goalkeeper will come through.

Though his angle may be tight, Messi is ever aware the goalkeeper is obliged to cover his near post. He will leave his feet, defy gravity, and use the momentum of his upper torso to lure the keeper toward his left post while rolling the ball softly into the opposite corner. After scoring a goal just like this against archrival Real Madrid in the 2011 Champions League semifinal, he was asked by a breathless press pack how it is humanly possible to coordinate the variable calculations of trajectory, angle, and execution so rapidly. Messi downplayed the achievement. “It was all instinct,” he revealed. “Only when I watched it later on television did I know what happened.”

Middle Earth XI: Footballers come in all shapes and sizes. While the game is often physically dominated by the big men, we live to celebrate the tiny scurriers, all of whom look like hobbits or Ewok internationals.

Milton Keynes: Town about forty-five miles northwest of London, where my dad unexpectedly revealed to us that he had owned a house for several years when it casually came up in conversation in the 1990s. No one in my family has ever been to, or been invited to, said home.

The modernist-designed city, which began construction in 1967, is home to MK Dons Football club, after Wimbledon FC’s controversial relocation there in 2003. In their sixteen-year history, the team’s most notable achievement is the cultivation of a young Dele Alli, who was sold to Tottenham Hotspur in February 2015 for a fee in the region of £5 million. —MD

Aerial view of alien landscape that is Milton Keynes. Hello, other Davos!

MLS Cup 1998: Of all the MLS Cups I have attended (one), this remains by far the most significant. It was remarkable for the fact that the two teams were coached by Bruce Arena and Bob Bradley, that Bradley’s Chicago Fire won the Cup 2–0 that year AS AN EXPANSION TEAM, and for the majestic sight of the Bolivian playmaker Marco Etcheverry’s jet black mullet, glistening like a localized oil slick in the late October Southern Californian sunshine. This was the first MLS Cup final at the Rose Bowl, and weirdly, though more than 50,000 people were in attendance, it was an intimate affair. I sat amongst DC United midfielder Richie Williams’s extended family, and it felt almost collegiate, supportive, more celebratory than competitive. But it was Chicago’s Polish small, Piotr Nowak, who was a class above every player in the game, and the way he worked superbly off their dominant tall, the ball-carrying Czech center back, Lubos Kubik, that really caught my attention. My theory of a world in which talls and smalls can and must work in perfect harmony on a football field was born. And also Jeff Agoos was there. —MD

Moleskin Pants: The ultimate winter pant cut from a fabric which, along with its cousin corduroy, are known as “fustian,” for the way they are woven with thick cotton to create a dense fabric. To create moleskin, the fabric is brushed, allowing a furry nap to emerge. In corduroy, ridges are cut into the fabric to create exotic ruts. Origins are unknown, but often traced back to steelworkers in nineteenth-century Sheffield who admired the fabric’s protective qualities—the tight weave fending off spark and flame.

Mortality: One of the only things in life that is as certain as Real Madrid or Barcelona reaching the Champions League final. Indeed, many social psychologists believe it is an awareness of our own mortality that drives us to be sports fans in the first place. “Terror Management Theory” suggests humans are drawn to symbolic systems that seem to provide narrative, meaning, and value with which we can both fend off fear, and connect to something seemingly permanent that will outlive us all. Like Norwich City.

Mourinho, José: Machiavelli in cleats. A master managerial motivator, whose preferred modus is to circle the wagons with his team and ride an “us against the world” mentality to glory. The intensity he employs in doing so tends to be furious, combustible, and ultimately self-destructive. A scorched-earth strategy that burns down everything around him. The Portuguese may bring silverware wherever he goes, yet devastation soon follows, as the manager tends to exit amidst scenes of discord and feuding after three seasons at any club.

Every time I have interviewed José, I have been blown away by his ferocious desire to twist a knife. The first time I filmed with him was July 2013 upon his return to Chelsea Football Club. Mourinho had just been spat out by Real Madrid after failing to come to grips with the politics of its ego-filled locker room, led, as rumor had it, by Cristiano Ronaldo.

My line of questioning was purely Chelsea-focused, but Mourinho drove the conversation to where he wanted it, segueing to a seemingly random conversation about the 2002 Brazil World Cup team. As our time together was extremely limited, my inner monologue was frantic, trying to understand why we had taken this detour and what I had to do to get us back on track. I needn’t have worried. Mourinho leaned into his story, talking with wild eyes bulging about the goal-scoring abilities of Brazilian phenomenon Ronaldo, then he paused for a beat, smirked at the camera, and sneered, “the real one, the Brazilian one.” The second our interview aired, this was the clip which blew up social media and became headlines all over the world, and one to which Portuguese Ronaldo even felt compelled to respond. Classic Mourinho. A man for whom football is a game of snubs, grudges, and scores to settle. One in which there is no limit to the amount of salt that must be rubbed into opponents’ wounds.

I would wage a bet that if Mourinho was asked the classic philosophical leadership conundrum, whether it is better to be loved or feared, he would sneeringly pick a third way—to be hated. Yet to me, his career cycles of boom and bust stand as a reminder of a piece-of-life wisdom British comedian Matt Lucas gave us when he came on our show: “You will meet everyone twice in life,” he said. “Once when you are on the way up and once when you are on the way down…so treat them accordingly.” —RB

Movies: Premier League football is shot from so many angles, and rife with so much narrative, fictional versions have rarely been able to compete with the drama of the real thing. Guy Ritchie came on our show and complained about the paucity. We are praying he will helm a remake of Victory. Here are our four best:

A documentary audaciously told by brothers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, narrating the intertwined stories of the rise and fall of Colombian soccer, Pablo Escobar’s gruesome reign as cartel kingpin, and the tragic career of doomed Colombian international defender Andrés Escobar, who was gunned down after scoring an own goal against the United States at the 1994 World Cup.

John Huston’s epic Sylvester Stallone vehicle set in a German POW camp and loosely based on the urban myth of a Second World War “Death Match,” between the best imprisoned professional footballers from Ukraine and the Nazi Air Defense Artillery football team. Worth watching just to see Michael Caine and Bobby Moore interchange passes with half of the late 1970s Ipswich Town team to set up Pelé for an overhead kick golazo. Stallone stars as cocky yet novice goalkeeper “Hatch.” Stallone reportedly demanded his character score the winning goal. It had to be explained to the American that even with his great thespian range, as a goalkeeper, that would not be happening.

Bill Forsyth’s poetic telling of the relationship between a nerdy goalkeeper and the beautiful female striker who joins his high school team. A perfect combination of football and the rhythms and heartbeats of adolescent angst, this is the film Wes Anderson would have made if he had grown up in Glasgow, no doubt wearing a corduroy kilt.

Seventeen cameras follow the French legend around the field for the entirety of a game, focusing only on his emotions and reactions through the course of play. The hypnotic experience that results doubles as one of the greatest pro-bald infomercials of all time.

Mud: There used to be so much more mud in football. Mainly because there was so much more mud in Britain. Everywhere. We have shared stories on the pod about going to rugby or football training after school, getting covered in mud, and then because we both refused, as almost all boys did, to jump into THE COMMUNAL BATH (basically a lukewarm septic tank FULL OF SAME MUD), we would wait for the mud to dry, caked onto our little, barely hairy legs, and then put our school uniforms on over said muddy legs and take the bus home. All boys of our age and era did it, and it is astonishing that more did not die of staph infections. Elite first division or FA Cup football, when we occasionally got to see it, was even muddier.—MD

Just after the final whistle of a not particularly muddy encounter between Sheffield Wednesday and Burnley in the first division in 1969

Nottingham Forest’s Viv Anderson charges past Terry Cooper (problems in sector 3.1) of Davo’s beloved Bristol City at about 4 mph on a completely acceptable first division surface in 1980.

Frank Lampard Sr. defending a corner at the near post, or perhaps stuck to the post, during an FA Cup quarter final in 1975. West Ham won the cup that May. But Frank Senior didn’t get all the mud off his legs until late October.

Mullets: A bi-level haircut named from molet (fourteenth-century Middle English), mulet (Anglo-French), mullus (Latin), and myllos (Greek), the hairstyle has secreted its traces across history, appearing first on the Sphinx in Giza, being imported to North America on the head of Revolutionary War general Horatio Gates, and then perfected by Facts of Life–era George Clooney. The cut has many power bases, including the American South and in minor hockey leagues all over the Canadian prairie, yet few cultures have been such a global melting pot for the mullet as World Football. Its popularity can perhaps be explained by its ability to communicate so many different things. The “South American Mullet” (4.1), owned by Kun Agüero when he broke through with Atlético, said “Baller.” Mesut Őzil’s blond “Mullet of Youth” (4.2) said “I think differently.” Newcastle and Spurs icon Chris Waddle’s “Northern Mullet” (4.3) said “It’s 1990 and I am English.” The 1980s Bulgarian defender Trifon Ivanov’s “Eastern European Enforcer Mullet” (4.4) said “I give you Levi’s, you be wife?,” and US 1994 goalkeeping hero Tony Meola’s “Jersey Chic” (4.5) do screamed “I am just lookin’ for a haircut that looks cool with stonewashed denim.”

Munich: I have cheered for the Germans just twice in my life. Once, when my seventh-grade history class learned how Austria and Prussia joined Britain and Russia to put Napoleon back in his box after his return from exile in 1815. And a second time when Manchester United faced Bayern Munich in the 1999 Champions League final.

I watched that game in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC, at my local bar, which was stuffed to overflowing with English Premier League fans. When Bayern’s dead-ball specialist Mario Basler spanked a free kick past Peter Schmeichel in the Manchester United goal after just six minutes, I sprang off my bar stool, punched the air, and emitted a belly laugh that was James Earl Jones–deep in tenor.

To my horror, the celebration was a solo affair, met by crickets. The bar man, a gregarious United fan, broke the silence by publicly dressing me down. “Roger, you’re Jewish! How could you?” he exclaimed, adding with a hint of jingoism, “Besides, they’re German. Does war mean nothing to you?”

The bar was too packed and the game too gripping for me to debate the point. Suffice it to say, when United summoned two stunning goals in injury time to pull off a miracle victory, I was as crushed as if I had been Bavarian, born and bred. —RB

Muppet Show, The: The Muppet Show was a US/UK collaboration right up there with NBC Sports and the Premier League, Fleetwood Mac, and Kanye West and Estelle. Turned down by every US network, the show was picked up by British commercial television impresario Lew Grade in 1976 and produced just down the street from Watford at Elstree. Of course, Rog and I have been greatly influenced by Statler and Waldorf, who now seem like early prototypes of the two of us. Rog’s favorite Muppet is the piano-playing, poetry-reading, deep-souled, lovelorn Rowlf the Dog. Davo is moved to tears in every way by Beaker’s rendition of “Oh Danny Boy” backed up by Animal and the Swedish Chef. —MD

Our role models

Davo’s spirit animal

Rog’s spirit animal

When you think of the definitive mustaches in history—you think Stalin, Hitler, or Tom Selleck circa Magnum P.I. Yet Robbie Earle’s November 2015 Facial Scrub deserves to be up there. It is the ’stache which single-handedly killed Movember.