I am a nerd. That much has never been in question. What continues to surprise me is that I have become a sports fan. Not a casual one, either. I mean the kind who sets alarms for Saturday morning kickoffs and mutters curses when a referee makes a call that anyone with functioning eyes could see was wrong.

This was not supposed to happen.

Growing up, I occupied a very specific corner of the cultural landscape. My brother and I were both nerds, though of different species. He was the mathematical mind, drawn toward numbers and patterns and the kind of structured thinking that would serve him well later. Mine was the creative mind, pulled toward stories and sounds and the kind of unstructured wondering that mostly just made me weird. I ended up listening to video game soundtracks and film scores while other kids were discovering whatever was on the radio. I listened to Linkin Park and imagined edgy scenarios where I was the protagonist of my own Kingdom Hearts-esque adventure. I have come to accept this about myself.

But the thing about growing up is that you spend your teenage years trying to figure out who you are supposed to be, and then you spend your twenties realizing that the answer keeps shifting. I'm coming to realize that identity is not set in stone the way it feels when you are seventeen or twenty-seven, and feel like you've got everything sorted. I have gone a long way trying to figure out exactly who I am, and I still do not know. That's okay, because the ever-shifting nature of Identity is the fun part. Nothing is quite set in stone. You learn to trust yourself even when you cannot fully articulate what that self consists of, but to be honest, I'm still working on the "Trust Myself" part.

Which brings me, somehow, to Football (Association… Soccer).

My discomfort with sports began out of exclusion. In elementary school, the kids who played soccer at recess were the popular kids, the cool kids, the ones who moved through the social hierarchy with alien ease. I wasn’t one of them. I was busy training to be a “ninja” with my friend Mikey, and Soccer became associated in my mind with a world that had no interest in including me. That sentiment, that feeling of resentment towards those players, sat with me for years, long past the point where anyone involved would have remembered or cared, fermenting quietly into something I mistook for a personality trait. I thought I did not like sports.

There was also the matter of my father, and the way that sports were supposed to function as connective tissue between fathers and sons. For many families, a trip to the ballpark or the stadium is where that bond gets built, where the inside jokes accumulate, and the shared language forms. My experience was different. Playing Catch was criticized, without the constructive bit. The sports trips happened, but they came wrapped in hassle and yelling and situations that left me with a profound negativity, particularly around football (the Gridiron Variety). What was supposed to be enjoyment felt more like pressure. Watching sports at home was like leaving a curious cat in a Swarovski warehouse; it was only a matter of time before the stillness was shattered. Yeah, I get it, it's a personal problem with yelling, etc., but we're all molded by our experiences. So the whole enterprise became something to endure rather than something to love, and I carried that weight around for a long time without examining it closely enough to understand what it actually was.

I became a nerd, and I let sports be something that other people did.

My brother, as it happens, is the reason any of this changed. He got into the Premier League before I did; his friends at college introduced it to him. Soccer (a.k.a. Football) to me was still the game the cool kids played at recess. At that point, I could name players like David Beckham or Pelé, but I had no idea about specific clubs or many of the rules beyond not touching it with your hands.

But I sat down and watched with him, and something clicked. Slowly, in the way that genuine interest tends to arrive when you are not expecting it. I took a quiz that told me Tottenham Hotspur were the club for me (a rather ironic outcome). The game was more intricate than I had given it credit for, and the logistics of two 45 Minute Halves and extra time to account for stoppages were beautiful in my estimation. The atmosphere in the stadiums felt like something alive, a collective emotional experience that I had never encountered outside of some local Hockey games. I was, against all expectations, getting into it.

But this was a time in my life where far too much was going on, and I was unable to keep a handle on things. I was dealing with relationship struggles, the deepest depression of my life, and a confluence of emotional turmoil. It would be some time before I even tuned into a match. I attempted to watch some matches during my first year away at NIU (Northern Illinois University), catching early Premier League matches on Saturdays… but in time, I lost track of the league, and soon I'd tuned out entirely for what was nearly a decade.

Welcome to Wrexham arrived at exactly the right moment in my life, when I was just open enough to the idea of caring about a football club to be completely blindsided by how much I ended up caring about this one. I had been aware of the vaguest details for a handful of years, until I finally bit the bullet and sat down to watch the show's four seasons last Summer. If you're unfamiliar, let me break this down for you. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying a fifth-tier Welsh club could have been nothing more than a celebrity vanity project, the kind of thing you read about in a headline and forget. The headlines, of course, balked at the idea of celebrities investing so much in a team that wasn't even in the Football League. Instead, the documentary turned it into something beautifully human, a story about a town and its people and what a football club actually means when it is woven into the fabric of a community.

Wrexham wasn’t winning trophies on global television. Wrexham was a small club in a small town with supporters who had been showing up for decades through relegation and financial uncertainty, watching the club they love slowly decline. And the show captured all of that with sincerity. I watched these fans, real people with real lives and real heartbreak tied up in the fortunes of a football club, and I understood for the first time what it meant to support a team, carry it with you, and let its fortunes affect your mood in irrational ways.

Wrexham made me realize that being a sports fan is not about the sport. It is about belonging to something, finding somewhere to belong, cough Linkin Park cough.

Spurs. A club that, as I would come to learn, has a particular talent for inspiring devotion and then finding increasingly creative ways to break the hearts of the people who offer it. If Wrexham taught me what it meant to care about a club, Tottenham taught me what it meant to suffer for one.

I started watching Spurs matches with genuine enthusiasm. Son Heung-min became the first player I could identify on sight, whose movements on the pitch I could follow with something approaching comprehension. I remember watching him and Harry Kane take the team to victory.

The problem with Tottenham, and I say this with the full understanding that every Spurs supporter who reads this will nod wearily, is that the club exists in a perpetual state of almost. Almost qualifying. Almost winning. Almost being the team that the narrative says they should be. The real-life season, as I write this, is progressing toward something that can only be described charitably as doom. The hope that flickered at the start of the campaign has given way to the familiar Spurs cycle of promise followed by collapse, followed by the quiet resignation of people who have been through this before and know exactly how the story ends.

And yet I keep watching. Earlier, I mentioned the irony of being guided towards Spurs, and the above sums up exactly what it feels like to be me sometimes. Promise, Collapse, and Quiet Resignation. It is a cycle that I've been on for a while, but for once, the collapse and resignation have not occurred.

Chicago Fire FC entered my life through the practical accident of already having an AppleTV subscription, and the surprising departure of Son Heung-min from Spurs. I was astonished that he would leave the Premier League for a U.S.-based "Soccer" franchise. The MLS Season Pass was just there waiting for me to subscribe, and the Fire are my "Local" Major League team. There is something uncomplicated about supporting the team closest to where you live; a geographic loyalty does not require the elaborate justification that choosing a Premier League club from across an ocean sometimes does. The Fire are mine because they're in Chicago, home to the Bears and Cubs alike.

MLS is a different animal from the Premier League, rougher around the edges and less polished in ways that some people hold against it. The quality of play is not what you see at the top of the English game, but the passion is real, the stadiums are full of people who care, and there is a scrappy underdog energy to the whole thing that appeals to the part of me that fell in love with Wrexham. American soccer is still building itself, still figuring out what it wants to be, and something is exciting about being present for that process.

The Fire's match against the Houston Dynamo on MLS opening day this year was electric. I started watching MLS as it was already headed toward the conclusion of the season, so to kick off a season live was really a treat.

What had started as simply watching the documentary about Wrexham developed into regularly following the Premier and Championship League broadcasts, and careened straight into watching other sports like F1, Rugby, and a spot of Celtic Football, Hurling, and of course the MLS.

My horizons have broadened greatly, finding that I want to participate in some of these sports, like Pickleball (America's Fastest Growing Sport), and yes, even Football (to which Soccer shall hereafter be referenced as). I've already got a set of Pickleballs and a pair of Paddles, and as each day passes, I feel the itch to pick up a Football.

A side-benefit to all of this is a growing connection with my students, whose perspectives are influenced heavily by the consumption and participation in Football as an extracurricular activity. Now, if only there was some way to bridge this burgeoning love for the Beautiful Game, with my love of video games….

Here is where I must make a confession, because the title of this piece was not chosen at random.

I have believed, for as long as I have been aware of their existence, that sports videogames are a scam. The reasoning was straightforward and, I thought, airtight. They release new versions every year (much like iPhones) and seem designed to extract money from people for what amounted to a roster update and a new number on the box. Sure, you can play as most, if not all, popular teams, but the aesthetics don't make up for the lack of a meaty centre. I had grown up watching my brother play all sorts of games; NFL and NBA Street, Many Maddens, Multitudes of MLB, until I bought my last sports game. Madden 2010 for the Xbox 360. It was fine, enough, but not the kind of thing I really kept up with. Eventually, everything was outdated anyway, and thus I decided to cease any further purchases…

Then I played EA FC.

I had felt the pull since day 1 of the Premier League Season. I was itching to get more football action between matches, and the timing of the FC26 release was right around the corner… The problem was my concurrent disdain of Sports Games and, of course, the ever-increasing sale price of video games. But now that we're over halfway through the 25-26 season, there was a STEEP discount on the game, which clinched the purchase.

What follows are the Anti-Sports Game Nerds’ thoughts on playing FC 26…

The interface was not helpful at first. Ultimate Team mode was sudden and confusing, a blizzard of menus and currencies and systems that felt designed to overwhelm newcomers into spending money they did not intend to spend. But the career mode, the manager scenario, was something else entirely. I chose Tottenham, naturally, because if I was going to do this, I was going to do it properly, and the symmetry of managing virtual Spurs while real Spurs careened toward disaster was too perfect to resist.

What I did not expect was how good the game would feel once I understood what I was doing.

FC has a dynamic difficulty system that analyzes how you play and adjusts itself to match your skill level, and the early stages of this process were, frankly, absurd. I was operating two difficulty tiers below where I would eventually land, and the results were the kind of scorelines that would get a real manager investigated for match-fixing. I had Kolo Muani score over a dozen goals by himself in a single match. We beat Arsenal 6-1 in one fixture and then followed it up with a 26-0 demolition in the next, a scoreline so cartoonish thatI was doubling over in tears.

It brought to mind an episode of the I.T. Crowd, where Moss and Roy use a website to translate the "Footballer Talk" to clear English. These two Computer Nerds were spouting out lines like "Did you see that Ludicrous Display last night?!" I even found myself repeating some of those same lines as it felt the AI goalkeeper let me "Walk it in." After I dispatched a Champions League side 6-0, the game finally decided I had proven myself and bumped the difficulty up to Professional.

The change was immediate. Suddenly, the matches felt real. The scorelines were tight, the AI was making intelligent decisions, and I found myself having to think about tactics and substitutions, and formations in ways that engaged the same part of my brain that enjoys chess. I have played 0-0 draws that felt like both teams were operating at the top of their game, matches where the absence of goals carried genuine tension. This also fundamentally changed how I watch matches now. Now I can see the tactics at work, the passing plays, and I was almost able to "see" a goal opportunity right before the player scored the shot. In this particular scenario, the player in question was Harry Kane, now leading Bayern Munich towards the top of the UEFA Champions League for 2026.

In a way, all of this, the football, the clubs, the video game, is a kind of renovation. There was a rough patch in my life where sports were supposed to be, and I'm laying new ground over it. The elementary school exclusion, the difficult trips, the years of assuming that this whole world was simply not for me; all of that left a gap in the shape of something I was supposed to enjoy and never got the chance to. Coming to love sports now, on my own terms, as an adult who chose it freely, feels like reclaiming territory that was always mine but that I had been convinced to abandon.

Wrexham taught me what a club means to a community. Tottenham taught me the specific flavor of heartbreak that makes victory, if it ever comes, taste like something worth waiting for. Chicago Fire gave me a local allegiance that connects me to where I actually live. And EA FC, against every expectation I had and every dismissive thing I ever said about sports videogames, gave me a way to engage with the tactical depth of the game on my own schedule, at my own pace, in the privacy of my own apartment where nobody but my girlfriend can see me yelling "Offside!" at a screen like it actually matters.

Sports videogames are still a scam, probably. I at least tried out F1 25, and I did pick up NHL26 at a steep discount too. I am hooked, and the scam is working, and I am not entirely sure I want it to stop.