I love soccer.

I love United.

There is only one United.

I love the Premiership.

And I love Major League Soccer.

I mean that sincerely.  I really do.

Those jokes, about MLS goals being “touchdowns” and MLS fans not speaking English are old, tired—and inapplicable. MLS matches drew on average 17,000 fans in 2010, a number that will increase substantially this season because of new facilities and perpetually-sold out expansion teams in Vancouver and Portland. The enthusiasm of those Pacific Northwest MLS crowds is incredible—35,000 a game, all in colors, singing, chanting and waving scarves.  Traveling en masse to away games.  Those games look and sound like Premier League or Bundesliga matches, except for the accent.

And remember—this is all happening in two cities where the NBA failed (Seattle and Vancouver).

MLS TV ratings are steady, if not overwhelming, despite being filler programming on ESPN2 on the worst night of television: Fridays. (Imagine how much better it could be if ESPN put more of its marketing machine behind the league.) Yet it feels like there’s a stigma against MLS: You have to have a European team as your favorite to be considered a “real” soccer fan.

Which frankly is (expletive deleted). We as American soccer fans should be humiliated.

For decades, in the pre-Internet era, we were starved for more than the skimpy (at best) coverage of European and Latin American leagues.  Our lack of knowledge, stemming from no domestic league, was severe.

But we endured.  We grew to love the game despite the traditional powers thumbing their noses at an “American soccer fan.”  The 1994 World Cup on American soil converted many of us, including me.

And now, when we have a viable, entertaining domestic league with compelling, American superstar players—we meekly re-colonialize our soccer passions.

Why can’t someone be accepted as a genuinely knowledgeable soccer fan—and have MLS be the league he follows? When someone asks you who your favorite soccer team is, you should say with pride: “DC United!” or “LA Galaxy!” or whatever MLS team is your favorite. And if the person starts to snicker at that response, you should say, uhm, something that rhymes with “duck shoe.”

We should be proud of our league.  MLS has been a godsend to us American soccer fans by bringing the game home.  Our steadily-improving national team is now almost exclusively trained by MLS clubs, though stars may parlay national team success into more lucrative stints in Europe. I’d argue that the quality of play in the MLS would make it the fifth or sixth best league in Europe, top-to-bottom.  Sure, England, Spain, Germany and Italy are far better, but I’d argue MLS is close in quality to the French Ligue 1. None of the other European leagues come close.  The leagues in Scotland, Portugal, Holland and Turkey are too top heavy; Russian teams benefit from the weather too much.

And we are attracting talent, players that want to come to play here not because of the paycheck, but because of the quality of play.  Say what you want about David Beckham coming here at the “end” of his career—Los Angeles revived his career in less than two years, with no less a suitor than AC Milan trying to get him back to Europe afterward. Thierry Henry left Barcelona for New York with plenty of miles left; surely any number of top-flight European teams could have signed him for more than what New York offered.

We at Perfecting the Upset are as much to blame for this neo-colonialization as anyone else: If you look at our Allegiances, you’ll notice that under soccer, there are no MLS teams represented. [Ed: Prior to this article, there were two MLS teams in the “Additional Allegiances” column, however.]  Yes, I know that next to my name is a Manchester United logo—and proudly does it reside there. But I was a United fan before MLS was born; World Cup 1994 made me a soccer fan, then my RSN made me a United fan in the same year by showing them every week until MLS started. Plus, I lived in England for most of my career, where my love for United was integrated with access to Old Trafford.

But I must confess that when I joined Perfecting the Upset, I didn’t even ask our esteemed editor Rahat to put a DC United logo on my allegiances.

(In fairness, part of the reason was that I didn’t want the extra workload.  But in a way, that proves my point, too.)

It’s time for us American soccer fans to be proud of our league.  We should proudly say that we watch MLS, and that we support our MLS clubs wholeheartedly.

I’ll go first: Please add DC United to my Allegiances.

There is are only one two United(s).

[Ed: MLS fans are also encouraged to check out Bradley Freedman’s “That Sounds a Bit Dodgy” on MLS importing announcers.]

Over the 4th of July weekend, Portland Timbers rookie midfielder Darlington Nagbe struck one of the goals of the season against Sporting Kansas City. After Nagbe’s fellow midfielder Jack Jewsbury served up a free kick which was punched away by Kansas City goalkeeper Jimmy Nielsen, the ball traveled directly to Nagbe’s right foot. He juggled the ball once, juggled it again and then struck a devastating shot into the top left corner of the net from outside the box. Thankfully for me, it was Portland’s only goal of the night.  My Sporting side won a 2-1 victory on the road, while I got the benefit of watching an enjoyable but harmless goal.

Watching the game from Kansas City, I heard the call from television announcer Callum Williams. He’s the 21-year old Birmingham native brought in this year from the BBC to be the voice of KC’s newly revamped Sporting franchise. A couple of days later, I happened to see the goal again online. That video was taken from Portland’s broadcast, and it included another British voice (presumably that of Robbie Earle, the English-born Timbers’ announcer). I also watched another contender for MLS goal of the season, this one struck by Vancouver’s Eric Hassli. Naturally, the announcing team (taken from a national Fox Soccer Channel broadcast) was also accent-tinged.

Was I offended at being exposed—during the celebration of our glorious Independence!—to a barrage of blatant outsourcing to our former colonizer? No. I was merely curious. At first I assumed there had been a concerted effort by MLS broadcasters to hire their on-air talent from overseas. An attempt to cater to some notion of cosmopolitanism among MLS fans? Perhaps. But then I realized that it might simply be the natural result of too many American soccer teams and too few American soccer announcers.

During last year’s World Cup, ESPN secured the famous voice of England’s Martin Tyler to be the lead play-by-play man from South Africa. This was after the network’s infamous use of Red Sox announcer (and soccer neophyte) Dave O’Brien in 2006. Fans were outraged that for the biggest tournament in the world, ESPN had to settle for a voice from baseball. But the lack of elite soccer broadcasters makes sense: There has never been any reason for an ambitious, talented broadcaster in this country to have anything to do with soccer. But as the MLS has expanded successfully in recent years to Toronto, Portland, Vancouver and Philadelphia, there’s an increasing demand for quality broadcasting talent made up of something other than retired MLS players.

All the same, I can’t dismiss the possibility that the prevalence of Brits is based as much on branding as it is broadcasting. In American culture, the English accent serves as a shorthand in and of itself. The clearest use of this shorthand is Hollywood’s mandatory accent rule of ancient Rome, which stipulates that anyone portraying a Roman must speak in an English accent. This doesn’t mean just hiring English actors. It means that non-English actors must fake an English accent. My personal favorite iteration of this rule occurred in Gladiator, when Russell Crowe (an Australian actor) used an English accent (to speak what historically would have been Latin) in order to portray Maximus Decimus Meridius (a Roman General), a character who the film tells us is actually from Spain.

But of course the point of the accent rule is clear: England had the greatest empire since the Romans, and the English accent conveys the breadth, grandeur and haughtiness necessary to stand in for Hollywood’s idea of ancient Rome.  (It’s also clear that however much of an empire America is, we still haven’t cracked the glass ceiling of Roman movie accents. How many more countries must we invade?)

For soccer in America, the shorthand of an English (or Irish or Scottish) accent is also clear: Guys with accents know a lot about soccer. And in a country where Cheryl Cole may have been fired by American Idol for her Geordie accent, soccer fans make up one of the few groups who are happy to hear an English accent because of the credibility it conveys. Yes, some of those fans are ignorant snobs who just think the accent “sounds better.” But most simply want to hear games called by people who understand the sport.

I don’t have a problem with the trend of British sportscasters in America. Yes, it would be nice if our country were able to provide enough homegrown talent to fill the broadcast booths, because that would mean that soccer is strong in America. And yes, I do hope that the talent being brought to the states is actually talented and not just a cultural branding strategy. (For what it’s worth, in my very limited exposure to Callum Williams, he seems perfectly well-suited for his job in Kansas City.)

Because soccer is still a niche in America, it’s easy to get people pissed off about it. Right now, half of our readers are probably pissed off that I’m writing about soccer at all. The other half are pissed off that I’m calling it “soccer.” Instead of lamenting our over-reliance on foreigners and our country’s lack of soccer expertise, I’ll say that I’m perfectly happy to have as many British broadcasters as we need to cover MLS. I’m less concerned about America’s lack of homegrown on-air talent than our lack of a homegrown striker.