After this year’s FIFA World Cup, I found myself in a familiar position: energized by watching football (FYI, I will be referring to soccer as football throughout, don’t @ me), wishing it was a bigger part of my life. But where in previous years, that fleeting feeling of longing would quickly subside/be waylaid by day-to-day life, this time, something lingered. I made the active decision that this would be the year that I got into the English Premier League, that I started paying attention in a more serious way to the world’s most popular sport.
And you know what? It stuck. I’m now fully obsessed. But beyond the beautiful game, I love the drama of leagues and their destinies, the players and their advancement, and the teams and their rise and fall. I mean, imagine an American sports team sucking so bad that they get relegated to a minor league. That’s drama, people. And so when the opportunity to play and review the accurately, if moronically, titled Eleven: Football Manager Board Game came up for grabs, I was fully in it. I says to Tony, I says, “mate, it’s meant to be, init?” So, will Eleven win the league and a permanent spot on my shelf, or will it suffer humiliating relegation to my sell pile?
