Men in Blazers Present Encyclopedia Blazertannica

Introduction

Hail! Unfortunate Accidental Readers and Great Friends of the Pod.

The volume you have in your hands was designed to be many things:

   1. The final nail in the coffin of the long-floundering publishing industry.
   2. Living proof that it is possible to write a worse book than Does God Love Michael s Two Daddies? by Sheila K. Butt.
   3. An ill-advised attempt to journey into the inky dark, unexplored depths of the Men in Blazers universe, every detail of which we have created hand in hand with our masochistically loyal listeners over the past eight years, pod by pod, show by show, tweet by suboptimal tweet.

To achieve the first two objectives, we chose to focus solely on the third. This task demanded we wallow in the history and culture of football, the sport we both love. With its pantheon of heroes and villains, moments of glorious ecstasy and searing despair, dodgy haircuts and surplus neck tattoos, it has empowered us to experience emotions other people seem to feel in real life, to which we are both inured. No telenovela could provide soapier story lines to keep us hooked like football . . . a game with plot points that unfurl live without a safety net, as the whole world watches.

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Witnessing the game we love grow and grow in America, the nation that we love, has been the thrill of our lifetimes. We both arrived on these shores as innocents, equipped with full heads of our own hair, in the early 1990s. Back then soccer had seemingly forever been cast as America s Sport of the Future, its recent past little more than a collection of false dawns and hyperbolic predictions that it was about to become the Next Big Thing.

We well remember the day when FIFA announced its intention to host the 1994 World Cup in the US, prompting panicked former-AFL-quarterback-turned-US-representative Jack Kemp to declare on the floor of Congress: I think it is

ROGER BENNETT was born in Liverpool and moved to the United States after university, under the thrall of Ferris Bueller, Hart to Hart, and Diff'rent Strokes. A writer, broadcaster, and filmmaker, Bennett began at ESPN and moved with Men in Blazers to NBC Sports to become the go-to interviewer for the biggest names in soccer, making films with the likes of Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola. MICHAEL DAVIES was born in London and educated in Scotland and the United States. For twenty-eight years he has worked as a television executive and multiple Emmy Award winning producer of many shows, including Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Davies started writing for ESPN.com in 2002 before partnering with Bennett on Men in Blazers in 2010. In addition to their podcast and television show on NBC Sports, the duo have a weekly show built into the phenomenally popular EA Sports FIFA game, and have developed a large live following.