There they were again, signaling with their unchanging faces and voices and their unchanging studio backdrop that another Premier League season had begun. On Friday afternoon, and again on Saturday and Sunday morning, Rebecca Lowe welcomed American viewers to what is somehow already the 14th season of the world’s most popular sporting circuit to air on NBC.
She was flanked, as ever, by her merry band of pundits, her gang of fellow British expats. The Robbies and the other ones. Also, Tim Howard as the token American, albeit one who spent 13 seasons of his goalkeeping career in the Premier League, deemed sufficiently English by osmosis to join the crew.
The games’ announcers would be British, too. And they would all speak of “football” and “pitches” and “away matches.” Teams would be “they,” of course. The ads, too, would sound very English, supremely English, maximally English. For Barclays, among other longtime sponsors leaning hard into the image of the beleaguered American fan, embattled but persevering in his or her niche pursuit of following this plucky little league that airs on one of the nation’s most readily available channels.
Taking it all in, I couldn’t help but think back to watching the BBC’s coverage of the final day of the last season for the first time in years with some English expat friends and some VPN trickery. It struck me that somehow, despite originating from the country, it didn’t actually look or sound or feel quite as English-coded as the NBC offering of the events. Except for the diversity of mellifluous regional accents on offer on the BBC, NBC has out-Englished the English.
Other broadcasters have chosen different approaches. Fox leans into its Americanness as hard as NBC does the Englishness in its World Cup presentation. Apple sits somewhere in the middle, on neutral ground, when it airs Major League Soccer.
If Major League Baseball’s core product is really nostalgia, and the NFL’s is consumerism and nationalism, then the Premier League’s, going by NBC’s presentation, is anglophilia. It’s all there. The satellite zoom-ins on the league’s quaint stadiums nestled between the brick row houses. The reverence for the club anthems and traditions. The poppies pinned to the on-air talent’s lapels every November to commemorate Britain’s fallen soldiers – a tradition which doesn’t entirely resonate in an American context.
NBC’s unsaid sales pitch feels like it should be: Catch a match, and you, too, could look and sound and feel more English, to yourself and to all your friends.
For NBC’s part, this has been a perfectly justifiable and coherent business strategy. And it has worked outstandingly well for the broadcaster. In a landscape of shrinking audiences, NBC’s Premier League viewers seem to tick up every year and posted their highest totals ever last season.
And in a way, all of this is baked into the recipe. Soccer owes much of its rise in these United States to the worldliness it confers. As the upper middle class discovered soccer – or rediscovered it, to be historically accurate – in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following it signaled that you knew there was more to sports than the NFL, NBA or baseball. That the rest of world mostly followed different sports, and that you were in on its secrets. Bonus points for drinking a Carling in a pub of some American downtown at 7.30 am on a Saturday.
But the question that is now imposing itself is how and when the US will develop its own soccer culture, where it no longer has to apologize for its quirks and its lingo. The wildly profitable – almost counterproductively profitable – 2026 World Cup demonstrated anew that the US has been a soccer country for a long time. The sport is mature here now. It is long past needing to establish itself and is now on to the trickier work of consolidating its status and making the smaller gains.
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Yet American soccer remains beset by a sense that it doesn’t entirely belong. Its players and teams must still scrap to be taken seriously outside their own borders. There is an unmistakable undercurrent of imposter syndrome running through our soccer scene. And when the sport’s most popular games are presented with an English accent, it stunts the growth of something authentic. How can an organic soccer culture blossom here, after belatedly taking root in the supporter sections of the many MLS and NWSL teams that rushed to brand themselves as “football club”, when NBC’s coverage chooses to stand in the shadow of another?
This isn’t to diminish NBC’s Premier League crew or their otherwise excellent work or indeed their career choices. And part of the appeal of the US is that, at its best, it accepts the cultures and norms of the world and finds a place to integrate those things into a kaleidoscopic whole. Lowe even announced that she was a naturalized citizen in 2022.
But eventually, American soccer will have to start doing its own things in its own way, rather than just copying what the cool soccer countries are doing. And, among other tasks, that means acknowledging that we speak differently. One wonders what that could do for the growth of the game here.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.