I sometimes watch the English Premier League (EPL) soccer, but I don’t listen. While the main commentators are reasonably inoffensive, their analyst sidekicks are intolerable. Welcome, World Cup 2026, with American soccer commentators!
I escape the EPL drudgery by putting it on mute or tuning into Spanish coverage. I can’t understand them, but I can at least get a palpable sense of the excitement. The reason. The EPL analysts blabber incessantly to justify their position in the booth. An example of their banal commentary would be dissecting a basic pass ad nauseam, from the weight to the angle and timing, as though it were a complicated proposition from Wittgenstein.
Give me a break! The player just kicked the ball to an open teammate, so stop pretending that’s a big deal. Don’t the players practice that all week while essential workers are out there performing tasks that actually benefit society?
Most EPL soccer analysts have a meager vocabulary, which is all too evident as they overuse words like “lovely” and “delicious” to describe basic passes and shots. Maybe it reflects the pansy nature of what used to be a contact sport. All I know is one would never hear such delicate terms during an NFL broadcast.
Not only do the analyst sidekicks overcomplicate such a simple game, perhaps trying to sound erudite, but their observations are delivered with awful diction. With a couple of exceptions, it seems that a prerequisite is semi-literacy along with an indiscernible accent. Scouse, Geordie, and Cockney vernacular may initially amuse, for example, when a lost tourist without a phone connection seeks directions from a local yokel (only to end up further astray). However, those dialects soon lose their “charm” when listeners are unable to interact for clarification.
Thank God, then, for the American World Cup commentators. While their “insights” are hardly revelatory (it is only soccer, after all), at least they don’t grate as much. Actually, amid the American team of broadcasters, Fox Sports is also deploying some Brits for World Cup match commentary. Compared to their EPL counterparts, they are listenable. Indeed, one senses that commentators like Ian Darke and Jacqui Oatley were paying attention during their English classes in school.
Even analyst Warren Barton (a retired player who spent a lot of time in Geordie environs with Newcastle United) is tolerable — probably because his accent has moderated since living in Southern California. Though he comes across as friendly and gracious — indeed, “listenable” — he still succumbs to analyst absurdity. Consider this comment from the Australia v. Turkey match (paraphrasing but retaining the sentiment): “You can’t win a game early on, but you can lose a game early on.” Um, ponder the illogical nature of that a moment — if a team can lose a game early on, surely it follows that their opponents can win it early on.
Bearing in mind it’s only soccer, the World Cup has been entertaining so far, helped considerably by the impressive U.S. performances against Paraguay — 4-1 is a veritable feast of goals in soccer — and Australia.
Fortunately, one can watch the action — and listen to it — in American English.
