We Were Forged in the Fires of Illegal Streaming Services
American soccer fandom: like the Uruk-Hai.
Soccer is more accessible in this country than ever, and also, it is not. Sure, you have options to watch it, oodles of options that pour forth from your screen of choice. NBC, NBC Sports Network, Peacock, ESPN+, Fubo, BeIN, DAZN, the utter catastrophe that was trying to watch NWSL and youth tournaments on the go90 app, truly one of the most awful viewing experiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating in. But with nearly all of those choices come either/or decisions for most. Almost all of them cost money to subscribe to, and almost all of them have exclusive deals with certain leagues and competitions in the United States. For literal millions of people in the U.S., that means choosing leagues, players, and countries at the expense of others. More soccer is available than ever. And also, more soccer is excluded.
The soccer streaming land race is still ongoing, as companies keep digging up properties they can package together and sell to people. Do you really need to be able to see games from League One, the Greek SuperLeague, and all levels of Scandinavian soccer? Do we have a deal for you!
Obviously, this represents something of a first-world problem for soccer fans. It feels dumb to be complaining about the wealth of soccer-watching options, given how many of those options and avenues were absolutely non-existent even a decade ago. Jon Arnold (of the Getting CONCACAFed newsletter, which is excellent, by the way) set out to curate some of the weird ways people fed their soccer addiction, and the odd places they found that could satiate their needs.
Some of us, however, aren’t as lucky as these brave souls who found warehouses, stadium lounges, and ballrooms to watch soccer games in. Some of us are from towns of 3,000 people and as many dairy cows in upstate New York. Some of us lived in towns that had two bars, one for college underclassmen to pretend they were somewhere else while home for the holidays, and one for the Bills. It’s me, that’s my town, I’m talking about myself again, surprise.
I didn’t have anywhere to go to watch a soccer game for essentially the first twenty years of my life. If ESPN wasn’t playing it, I wasn’t watching it. Instead, I got my kicks playing FIFA and scrolling through Yahoo! Answers soccer boards, trying to learn about the game. However, going to college and getting my first laptop opened up a world to me I had never thought possible: streams of questionable legality.
I’m talking Reddit links. I’m talking 360p resolution. I’m talking pop-up ads for Russian women looking for love in your area. While some of you got great mouse reflexes playing Counter-Strike, I trained in the way of the pop-up close-out quick-draw. Speed, accuracy, the mortal fear that you would get a virus if you did not close this window in 0.0069 seconds. No ad-blockers, just so I could feel something. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
Large swathes of the American soccer fandom were cultivated online. Much of that was due to blogs and message boards, yes, but still another massive part of that scene was finding the most obscure stream you could in hopes that it wouldn’t get shut down before halftime. I have not done any of the work or polling for this, but I almost guarantee you that if you asked 100 fans of soccer between 2000 and 2010 in the United States if they had ever watched an illegal stream of a soccer game, at least 90 of those people would say yes. It was a rite of passage. As one site got shut down, we’d scroll through BigSoccer and Reddit and find the next one. Leagues would start “getting serious” about pirated streams of their games and still, somehow, more would appear out of the digital ether. Robin Hoods broadcasting games any way they could.
Today’s streaming services are finding more and more ways to send us straight back to the 2000s. I have access to ESPN+ and Peacock, and still, there are hundreds of games a year I’d like to be watching that I simply cannot afford or cannot even find. I tend not to worry about all that too much, however. I grew up in the time of hesitantly clicking links and closing out of pop-ups with blinding speed. I’m willing to bet that most of you reading this did, too. And, as un-ideal as it may be, I don’t think that streaming culture is going anywhere anytime soon.
We were forged in the fires of illegal streaming services. We are the Uruk-Hai of internet soccer fandom. We sleep on beds of broken glass and take our breakfast nails without any milk. And we are not afraid to return to the old ways.
And Now Let’s Check in on Manchester United
Alexa, play “Let It Go.”
I Am All the Way Here for the Jurgen Klopp vs. Roy Keane Showdown
And as easy as it is to dunk on Roy Keane and his Zubaz-pants view of the way soccer should still be played, this is just phenomenal television. If Klopp ever decides to retire from managing, give him a talk show with Roy Keane. It’ll be like Skip Bayless’ shows, except neither of the people talking will be a coward like Bayless is, so there’ll always be the possibility of a real fight actually happening.
Tune In for Tales of Blanco
I’m friends with The Cooligans, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t consistently put out the funniest and most interesting interviews in the game right now. And I’m all the way here for Cuauhtémoc Blanco locker room stories.
