Hello I'm Andrew Beck

You might find it odd that a guy living on the West Coast of the United States started watching English Premiere League Soccer (that 8 hour time difference and all). Or that of all the teams to follow he chose Fulham. I assure you it all made sense at the time. I didn't grow up a soccer fan. I played a little as a youth, watched a little of Soccer Made in Germany when it was on PBS, and watched the US Men's National Team when they started airing games during the 1994 World Cup. When I was in college, I would sometimes see odd random games on the multitude of sports channels I had on DirecTV (usually very late at night when nothing else was on). Two things changed all of that. The first was the popularity of the Seattle Sounders and how visible soccer became in the city I reside. I almost felt I had to know more about the sport just to converse with people I met. The second thing was the appearance of Fox Soccer in my cable package right in time for the 2011/2012 season. Having a channel which showed the games, plus a DVR to time shift them, suddenly made watching them all viable. Of course this meant I had to chose a team to follow.

Being an extremely logical math and engineering guy, I set about it in the most logical fashion I could think of. I first narrowed my search to London. I knew at some point I would probably want to travel to see a game, and like most Americans who visit England, I probably wouldn't stray to far from London. That made choosing a team much easier. Not wanting to cheer for one of the big teams only left me with three options: QPR, Fulham, and Spurs. Fulham was the easy choice. I liked their history. I liked what I read about Craven Cottage. Some of my favorite American players had played there (Brian McBride and Kasey Keller). They had a history of Americans on the team. And the maybe the best American player of all time was still there.

So that's how I came to follow Fulham and started waking up at ungodly early hours most weekends to watch soccer. If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask in the comments or find me on twitter. Hopefully some of you out there have similar stories you could share. I'm always fascinated by how people end up following the team they do, especially when they don't grow up with it.