Over the past few weeks (and for the next two weeks) I’ve been captivated by the World Cup. As an American, this is stereotypically unusual; most Americans are pretty apathetic about the most popular sport on the planet.  I’ve even been watching games that don’t involve Team USA.

However, I know I’m not the only American excited about the game; I see the (mostly American) twitterati going wild over game results.  I read an article yesterday about how bars in the big American cities are packed at 9am for Team USA games. People in places like Washington DC, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle are excited about the games.  So, I ask – who are these people packing bars at 9am to watch soccer? Do they have jobs? Here in academia, I can spend a few hours in morning in my office or at home with the game on ESPN3 on my computer.  What about everyone else?

I planned on typing up a long blog post about this; making a case for a soccer intelligentsia. I conjecture that the average US soccer fan is white, grew up in the suburbs, works in some creative form (academia, design, etc), drinks microbrews, lives in an urban area, and probably has a graduate degree.  This lead me to some googling and clearly I am the 1,329,401st person to think about this problem.  A better summary of my thoughts about this can be found in an already written article over at Slate.com