Premier League: How football 'made in England' got big in USA

Roger Bennett grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s with posters of Ferris Bueller, The Fridge and Bob Latchford on his bedroom wall.

So it is hardly surprising he would find himself in the US in the 1990s, looking for work and trying to find a way to watch Everton games.

"When I first moved here I would go to a bar on Saturday mornings and there would be about a dozen Brits there," said Bennett, who got his dad to hold the radio up to the phone so he could listen to Everton's 1995 FA Cup semi-final win over Spurs (he was presumably too broke to repeat the trick for the final).

"We got one game a week then and it would often be something awful like Sheffield Wednesday versus Leicester.

"Every now and then an American would wander in and ask 'is Full-ham on?' To which the chilling answer from the scariest-looking Brit would be 'walk on, mate, walk on.'

"The impression was that global football was a lecture room and Americans were lucky to be allowed in and they had to keep their hands down.

"Now they have full-throatedly fallen in love with football and it is a joyous thing."

The evidence of that was clear at the Brooklyn Expo Center, where Bennett and fellow ex-pat Michael Davies were about to hold their most ambitious lecture yet: a two-day celebration of what most of the attendees who I spoke to called "soccer…sorry, football".

There was a queue of 1,300 customers around the building, most of them wearing English football club shirts or scarves, bartenders lining up pints of IPA and stout in the beer tent, and staff at the food stall filling the heated shelves with chicken and mushroom pies.

But more startling than this giddy outbreak of Anglophilia in what is meant to be New York's coolest neighbourhood was the crowd gathered in the VIP room.

Because there - in the borough that is home to the NBA's Brooklyn Nets and NHL's New York Islanders and which gave birth to American sporting icons like the Dodgers, Michael Jordan and Vince Lombardi - were the boss of the Premier League and the chairmen or chief executives of four of his member clubs.

Oh, and the bosses of the USA's Major League Soccer and Germany's Bundesliga were on their way.

"This is about how much America loves world football, but also how much world football loves America," said Bennett, the best teacher a new student of the game could ever hope for, as he announced the start ofBlazercon,  the football convention spawned by his and Davies' phenomenally successful Men in Blazers podcast and TV show.

Equal parts Saint and Greavsie, Wayne's World and Alistair Cooke's Letter from America, Men in Blazers has gone from a conversation at a wedding about how much they miss football banter to becoming aweekly television show   on NBC Sports and what Bennett describes as "a beachhead" for the wave of invaders from across the Atlantic.