The Other Football

It was familiar and it was strange, simultaneously. I got home yesterday afternoon in just the right time to catch the final twelve minutes of the Championship game of the Union of European Football Association, UEFA.

To show you the global appeal of the sport, well, everywhere but here in The Land of the Round Doorknobs, the game was played on the mother of all pitch, Wembley Stadium in London, United Kingdom, between two teams from Germany, Bayern Munchen who won the 50th anniversary season of the Deutsche Fussball Bund, in a record setting 28 games (!) {think clinching any divisional title in baseball a week after the All-Star Game; except the AL West which is usually in doubt three weeks after the season ends} and Borussia Dortmund who won the DFB title last season.

I was watching it on Fox Sports in Spanish, not because I speak the language (I don't), but because I didn't know where else to find it. Between watching Heineken Beer TV commercials voiced over in Spanish and listening to a booth announcer scream out and mangle Bastian Schweinsteiger's name, I never lost sight of the fact that I was in all likelihood one of about a dozen round-eye Anglos on the North American continent watching the beautiful game at all.

I'll root passionately for somebody come World Series time, but I'm reasonably certain all the teams will be based in North America. So as Shakespeare once asked, what's in a name?
-bill kenny