An NFL Fan's Guide to the Premier League
My friend Rotimi teaches me about fútbol, makes NFL-Premier League team comparisons, and helps me choose which team an Eagles fan like me should root for
At Dickinson College, it was ritual to drink lukewarm Bud heavies and play FIFA with my friends. And when blessed with the opportunity to hit sticks, it was my destiny to get smacked. Walloped. Pan-fried. Despite growing up playing soccer and digesting my fair share of half-time orange slices, I understood very little about the game. What’s worse is that I had no allegiance to a team. I chose what team to play with based on whether or not I recognized any of their players. I was surrounded by friends who were Chelsea and Manchester United fans, while depriving myself of a global fandom experience and the opportunity to finish sentences with “innit.”
On a professional sports level, I invested all of my fan stock into the tumultuous experience of rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles (we will forget about the 76ers at this time for mental health purposes). The waters are rocky, the vibes are mixed. But I’ve always been interested in the Premier League, and to supplement my obsession with the NFL, I’ve always wanted to find a soccer team to root for. But between new shows on Apple TV+ and scrolling through (name your app), I simply haven’t had the time.
With the NFL offseason slowing down and the World Cup coming to the States, there’s no better time to get in the game (the wise words of EA Sports). So to better understand the Premier League and to help me choose a team to devote my undying loyalty to, I recruited one of my oldest friends and diehard Premier League fan Rotimi Oyewole, to break it all down for me by comparing European soccer to American football.
Before Arsenal (new favorite team contender #1) takes on PSG this Saturday in the Champions League final, Rotimi talks to me about the structure of the Premier League, why there aren’t any playoffs, why relegation feels like going to the sunken place, and all while making NFL comparisons for Premier League teams.
You’re a Chelsea fan, right?
ROTIMI: Yeah, I’m a Chelsea fan. When we were in college, as you know, I studied abroad in London. Growing up, we played FIFA all the time, right? And I would rotate between a few different teams, Chelsea being one of them, but also, embarrassingly, Tottenham. When I studied abroad in London, a big reason why I became a Chelsea fan was one of the trips that my program offered was the opportunity to tour Stamford Bridge, which is the stadium that Chelsea plays in. There was something about the grounds that felt historic.
One of the transformative things that Chelsea experienced was in 2004, when we had a Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, step into the building, and he just started spending. And so a club that was historic and had a lot of history to it, but not necessarily like a ton of success, became incredibly successful over a 15-year period. And so, yeah, that’s around when I joined in 2010, we won our first Champions League. I want to say in 2012.
The first one that they won in 2012?
ROTIMI: Yeah, the first Champions League. We won the league for the first time in 2005 and have won it a few times since then. When Roman came on board, we became a team that won a lot of trophies and had this incredible ambition. And so growing up as a hurt Washington Redskins fan, it felt good to support a team that actually won something instead of a team that was, you know, ridiculously poorly managed. In addition, you know, my mom grew up in London and not too far from the Chelsea stadium. I think the last reason is that we had all of these African powerhouses, Didier Drogba, John Obi Mikel.
Can you explain the Premier League to me like I’m a 7-year-old? Like, how does relegation work? How long is the season? When do the playoffs start?
ROTIMI: Ooh, playoffs. Okay. We’ve got a lot to discuss.
Let’s do it.
ROTIMI: The Premier League is the top league in English football. Let’s say there are four divisions. There’s really more than that, but you have League Two, League One, the Championship, and then the Premier League.
The Premier League is the top English league and has 20 teams. Each of those 20 teams plays one another in the league, home and away, so twice in total.
For all 20 teams?
ROTIMI: Yeah, so there are 38 weeks in the league. That’s in the league itself, but then there are four competitions a year. So you have two English domestic tournaments that run through the year.
One is the FA Cup, which includes not just those top four divisions, but all the divisions underneath. They call them non-division teams. That’s the oldest tournament. And that happens in parallel to the regular Premier League season. So every few weeks, instead of playing a Premier League match, you’ll play in this tournament that’s basically single elimination.
And so what spices up football in general is having these tournaments on top of this longstanding season, right? Because you mentioned playoffs, the Premier League doesn’t have playoffs. Instead, it has a point system.
How’s the point system work?
ROTIMI: If you win a match, you get 3 points, if you draw a match, you get 1 point, and if you lose a match, you get 0 points. At the end of the 38 weeks, whichever team has the most points wins the Premier League. And so winning the Premier League is a marathon. It’s a sign that you are the most consistent team.
So there’s no championship game or like anything like that?
ROTIMI: Not in the Premier League. So I mentioned the Premier League and the FA Cup. You also have the domestic trophy that we call the Carabao Cup, which is just basically a tournament for the top divisions in English football.
And then you have the Champions League. The Champions League is a long-term tournament that happens again in parallel with the normal season, and it isn’t just the English teams. It’s the best of the English teams playing the best of the Spanish teams, best of the French teams, best of the German teams, and so on. So it’s like a club World Cup that happens every single year.
It’s a huge deal to qualify for the Champions League, and the best players want to play in the Champions League, and they want to join the teams that are going to qualify for the Champions League. So earlier, when I mentioned Chelsea just hasn’t really been the same for the last few years. We haven’t made the Champions League three out of the last four years. It has a huge effect on the talent that we’re able to attract. It’s like joining the Washington Wizards, being like, you guys aren’t going to make the playoffs. Why would I join you?
So do all the world’s best players want to play in the Premier League?
ROTIMI: It’s actually a little bit more nuanced. The Premier League has the best global viewership, and it’s considered the most competitive league. By most competitive, it means that you tune in, and the team that’s in first place could easily lose to the team that’s in 15th place. The quality is great, but the play style is different.
La Liga (the Spanish league) is really exciting to watch. If you’re a Spanish player, maybe you want to stay in a league where it’s all Spanish, you know, it’s Spanish referees, Spanish culture. So yeah, I think that it’s a little bit more nuanced. I think often, yes, the best players will go to the Premier League, but that’s not necessarily true. Like Messi, for example, never played in the Premier League.
Oh really?
ROTIMI: Yeah, no, he never went to the Premier League. Cristiano Ronaldo was at Manchester United and then left. He played in Italy, he played on, you know, the best team overall. And that’s the interesting thing about the Champions League, right? Like the Premier League is the best, the most competitive league, but it doesn’t necessarily always have the best team. The Champions League normally determines the best team.
So a lot of these players are going to roll from the Champions League right into the World Cup?
ROTIMI: Yeah, which is insane, right? So you have 38 matches as part of your normal season, right? And then, depending on how far you go in each of these tournaments, maybe at this point in the season, you’ve played 60 matches already.
What about the current landscape of the league in general? Historically, who are the top teams?
ROTIMI: So Arsenal, they haven’t won the league in like 20 years, but they finally won it this year. There’s a sort of joke that they are perpetually second place. Like for the last, I think three years, they’ve been second place in the league. They’ve lost to Man City in a couple of finals. They, you know, they just keep on coming in second place.
It also feels deeply millennial to be an Arsenal fan.
ROTIMI: I can see that, yeah. Arsenal is based in London, so I think they have some international appeal. They have historic players like Thierry Henry, arguably one of the best players ever in the Premier League, who played there. They have this reputation of playing really good football. Nowadays, they are…what was that sort of thing in the NFL where, like, it’s not a QB sneak, but it was like a something bum thing. I can’t remember what it was, but people were talking about it.
The tush push?
ROTIMI: Tush push, yeah! Maybe not the exact same, but like they’ve scored 17 goals from corner kicks, right? And so like their style of play, people consider it quite boring, and they’re not exciting to watch, even though they grind out results often by set pieces like corner kicks or free kicks.
A big topic of conversation in the NFL was when the Eagles were the best in the league at doing a tush push. And the league tried to ban it because they were so effective at doing it.
ROTIMI: I think it’s very similar. The narrative has been like, well, Arsenal’s been playing rugby on these corners. They haven’t gotten called for all the antics that they’ve pulled. And so people are anticipating that over the summer, they’ll probably change the rules, or like the refs will start enforcing fouls on these corner kicks.
Do you see a lot of parity in the league, or do you see teams build dynasties?
ROTIMI: Yeah, so Man City has definitely been the most recent dynasty. I think Man United is the previous. The Dallas Cowboys, to me, are like Manchester United, where they have their glory days of the past, where they were very dominant. They have maybe the best manager in Premier League history, Sir Alex Ferguson. They were a true dynasty. They were incredible in the 90s and early 2000s. And then, you know, they’ve been mid or trash for the last 10 years, and this year they’re in third place.
And then you have Man City, who are like the Kansas City Chiefs, who are now all of a sudden really, really good. People joke that they don’t really have any real fans. Like, it’s kind of true. I go to bars to watch matches, and like, I go see a Spurs match. It’s packed with Spurs fans. I go see an Arsenal match, Liverpool match, Chelsea match. You got those fans there. I watch Man City play, and I don’t see a single fan. Like they just don’t really exist.
They’re like an industry plant.
ROTIMI: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s a psyop of some sort. So you have what you call the Big Six. Arsenal, Man City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, and then Tottenham.
Tottenham’s in the big six? Weren’t they kind of bad for a while and then kind of got good?
ROTIMI: They’ve been bad for most of the time I’ve been following soccer. They had one year, maybe two years, when they came in second place. They call them “Spursy”. Like it’s Spursy to like fuck up a lead. They’re just like, kind of nervy and will often fuck up when it looks like they have control.
That’s like how NFL fans traditionally talk about the Los Angeles Chargers and “Chargering”.
ROTIMI: So, something we haven’t talked about yet is that the bottom three teams every year will get relegated. And then the top three teams from the championship will get promoted. And this is another really fun thing about the Premier League is that, yes, you’re interested in seeing who’s going to win the league. You also want to see who are going to be the top four or five teams that qualify for the Champions League. And then you’re also invested in seeing what three teams are going to unfortunately miss out and get relegated.
And getting relegated in the Premier League is kind of like, you know, it’s like a disaster for your finances because you’re not getting that broadcast revenue that you would from the Premier League. If you’re a top talent, you want to be in the Premier League. So now your players are going to ask for transfers out. Sometimes you see teams get relegated and then they just keep on getting stuck in the championship or relegated even further.
It reminds me of that scene in “Get Out” when he sinks into the chair, and he’s just falling.
ROTIMI: You’re in the sunken place.
Do you feel like for those teams, getting to the Premier League is pretty much all that they play for? That they’re like, “okay, we made it to the Premier League. This is it for us.”
ROTIMI: You know, I think so. But then you have these other tournaments, right, where, like, your objective might be, let’s get to the semifinals of the FA Cup. Let’s see if we can really do that, right? And sometimes that happens. Sometimes you even make it to the final. Being a Washington Commanders fan, there was just nothing for us to celebrate ever. And it’s like, pretty American and very capitalistic in that, like, you’re all fighting to win one trophy. And if you don’t win it, like, too bad.
Like, zero-sum.
ROTIMI: Yeah. If you ain’t first, you’re last, right? Whereas here, there are four opportunities for you to win. And then also there are opportunities for you to stay up or to qualify for different competitions. So like, I think that every season there’s like basically 8 or so Premier League teams out of 20 that have something to really celebrate. And that’s kind of cool.
Ok, let’s do an exercise. Give each of the Premier League Big Six teams an NFL Team comparison. We talked about how Manchester United is very much like the Dallas Cowboys. Manchester City is kind of like the Kansas City Chiefs.
ROTIMI: Man City may even be like the Patriots and, you know, in that time where they were just dominant, right? Let’s talk Liverpool. I think that it’s a historic club with a sort of working-class background. I think it’s a pretty working-class town where it’s really all about the club. That’s what everyone there is passionate about. I would say it reminds me a little bit of the Green Bay Packers.
That’s exactly what I was gonna say. Are they always competitive but never really win it all?
ROTIMI: They’re always competitive and they win sometimes, and they’ve had periods of a ton of success. I think that what hurt them is that Man City was in their dynasty when they were maybe at their peak. So they didn’t win as much as they could have. They were kind of second place for several years, even when they were historically breaking records. City was just doing even better.
That sounds exactly like the Packers.
ROTIMI: I guess Arsenal was historically kind of successful with periods of being underachievers. But I think some people are drawn to them for the longest time because they had this coach, Arsène Wenger, this French dude, and he was always applauded for playing beautiful football. Even if they didn’t win much, they were like, oh, they’re very, you know, beautiful. And I’m not sure what the equivalent of that would be in the NFL.
I honestly think it’s the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles had Andy Reid for a long time. They always got close but could never win. And then they moved on from him, and had a period where they weren’t so great before having this resurgence where they won two Super Bowls in the past nine years. Not to mention the tush push equivalent with what Arsenal is doing with the corner kicks feels very similar. They feel like they’re a team that’s finally at the top after a long time of being a bridesmaid.
ROTIMI: Yeah, I could totally see that. So Tottenham is considered a big club even though they haven’t won shit. We always joke that they won their first big trophy last year when they won the Europa League. The Europa League is like the NIT, right? So if you don’t qualify for the Champions League, there’s another European competition called the Europa League, and they won that last year. And so, that’s the first trophy, honestly, I can remember them winning in like over a decade. You mentioned the Chargers earlier, and maybe that’s the closest equivalent.
Yeah, or even the Buffalo Bills. The Bills are a team that everybody loves. Everybody applauds the Bills for being this incredible franchise, but they have not won shit.
ROTIMI: Didn’t they lose the Super Bowl four years in a row?
Yeah, back in the ‘90s.
ROTIMI: Good Lord, that’s very Spursy.
What about Chelsea?
ROTIMI: I’m too close to this. I really do feel like right now we’re entering our Dan Snyder era where our management’s throwing us into the ground. But I feel like for a long time we were well financially backed. We’d fire coaches very regularly, but, like, it would somehow work or we’d win.
Interesting.
ROTIMI: And so I’m not sure if there is a team like that in the NFL that has been successful under different managers and has had a lot of money. Chelsea itself is in a ritzy part of London. Tickets are expensive, and I think we get a lot of tourists. So when you go to Stamford Bridge, it is kind of embarrassing. And our fans are used to success. So we’re in this tumultuous period where everyone’s disappointed, and we’re booing the team at halftime when we’re down a goal because we expect better. So there’s a level of entitlement. There’s a level of posh London. I’m trying to think of what NFL clubs represent that…
Even the trajectory of like, you had this period of dominance and then because of ownership or whoever’s calling the shots, things have kind of gone under a little bit and there’s a lot of frustration because there’s an expectation with winning. It kind of reminds me of the New York Giants, as terrible as that sounds. The Giants had this deep culture of winning in the ‘90s and the 2000s. They’re a historic franchise that in recent years has become shit. They really pissed off a fan base that has an expectation of winning with all of their sports. You know what I mean?
ROTIMI: I really like that. I did not think of that, honestly, but I think that is kind of spot on, the entitlement aspect.
One club that’s well run, but doesn’t have that much to show for it, is this club called Brighton. They’re solidly mid-table, but they are really good at recruiting players and developing young talent. And they are admired by everyone who cares about data. They do a really good job of buying low, selling high, and finding these gems that nobody else is, really recruiting. I’m curious if there’s an NFL team that everyone’s like “Oh, they have like a really good offensive coordinator, there’s such a well-run operation,” even if they haven’t really made it to the Super Bowl or anything like that.
I think it’s the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings have a head coach who’s an offensive genius. They find these diamonds in the rough. They’re the ones who resurrected Sam Darnold’s career before he went on and won with the Seahawks last year. They signed Kyler Murray from the Cardinals this year. They bring in these guys who are kind of like these reclamation projects and manage to find value in them because the offensive system is so strong. They lean into analytics, but they just haven’t won it all. They’re in a really tough division. And even though they always have one of the best records in the league, they can’t seem to go all the way.
ROTIMI: Yeah. I can see that.
As a Philly sports fan myself, you know, I’ve been looking for a Premier League team since we were in college. What is a team that you would recommend to Philly sports fans?
ROTIMI: I think when I look at the top six, like honestly, I don’t know that any of them really match what I would think of as far as that Philly grit. And I also have to come to this as a Washington Commanders fan. Like, your fan base, I think, has a level of toxicity.
100%.
ROTIMI: I’m trying to also match that. And to me, when I think of the diehard fans, I think of Newcastle, I think of Leeds, and I think of Aston Villa. Now, Aston Villa is an interesting one. I think they have a good amount of history. They’ve been asleep for a long time, but now they’re seriously in contention. They made it to the Champions League. They won the Europa League. And I do feel they’re well-run and a hard-fighting team.
We haven’t really talked much about the style of football. I think that a lot of teams, modern teams, are taking this sort of, like, possession base where, you know, you’re trying to have the ball as much as possible. And I feel like Aston Villa doesn’t really care as much about that. Like, they’re just like, let’s just go out and win.
But I think of the top six, maybe Liverpool or Arsenal. The Arsenal comparisons are real in terms of the tush push and in terms of where they are at this point. They used to play a very possession style, and now they’ve gotten a little bit more, just like win at all costs. Their fans are known for being delusional. For the longest time, they thought they were the best team ever, and everyone just sort of laughed at them, and now they won. It’s this huge crisis because nobody wants Arsenal fans to actually win something.
Dude, thanks for literally taking the time to explain this to me.
ROTIMI: Yeah, man. I mean, it’s definitely so different from how sports are in the U.S. But it makes every game kind of count. I love the way that every game counts in the NFL. There are also different things to play for. And that keeps it interesting.