"Spain won the World Cup but I've got a feeling the Premier League will be the real long-term winner." That's Roger Bennett — Men in Blazers co-founder, lifelong Evertonian, and one of the sharpest reads on American soccer culture — summing up what the 2026 World Cup actually delivered.
Not just a tournament. A gateway drug.
Bennett watched the summer unfold with the enthusiasm of someone who has spent two decades trying to sell this sport to a country that was never sure it wanted to buy. And by his account, it finally bought in — one Waffle House, one Buc-ee's, one Erling Haaland hat-trick at a time. College football fanbases doing the Viking row. Boston temporarily becoming the capital of Scotland for ten days during Scotland's run. A generation of American sports fans seeing Messi, Mbappé and Haaland in the flesh.
What Comes Next Is the Real Question
The World Cup buzz fades. What sustains it is the weekly grind of club football — and that's where the Premier League's opportunity sits. Bennett points to Arsenal's four-year near-miss arc as a case study in how American audiences engage. "Try and fail, try and fail, try and fail" is the kind of narrative that built NFL fanbases across entire generations. Americans know how to invest in a team that keeps falling short. They've had a lot of practice.
Haaland, predictably, is a hook. Bennett compares him to a young Shaquille O'Neal — a physical force so cartoonishly dominant that even casual fans can feel it. That kind of shorthand matters when you're trying to pull someone in who doesn't yet know the offside rule.
Not every club is capitalising equally. Chelsea built a US following and then spent years torching it with transfer chaos and managerial churn. Bournemouth, meanwhile, has quietly grown an audience on underdog energy and Bill Foley's American ownership. Tottenham have the London premium — Americans love London clubs because a trip to watch a match doubles as a holiday. And if Spurs ever figure out how to actually win something, that base could surge.
Everton's Unlikely American Fanbase
Then there's Everton. Sixth-best supported Premier League club in a Men in Blazers poll, ahead of Manchester City. Without a trophy since 1995. Battling relegation more often than title races in recent memory.
How? Bennett traces it back to Predrag Radosavljevic — Preki — a former USMNT midfielder who played at Goodison in the early nineties. Then Tim Howard. Then Landon Donovan. A biblical lineage of American connections that gave fans a reason to look. And once they looked, they found the atmosphere: the German shepherd outside the ground, the blue flares, the desperate, intoxicating matchday theatre that no marketing budget could manufacture.
"You watch that and want to jump through the screen and be there," Bennett says. "That's when the football has been dark. That's why I think — what could Everton be if...?"
The "if" now has a new stadium to grow into. Hill Dickinson Stadium, capacity 53,000, cost around £800 million. Everton left Goodison Park in 2025 after 133 years, and Bennett — a third-generation fan who attended his first game there in 1978 — describes the departure with a precision that cuts through any sentimentality.
"It was like a musty old rotting box, but it was a vehicle of memory. I felt a lot of gratitude and a lot of grief."
That's the thing about being an Evertonian. The grief is structural. It's built into the support. Bennett watched a 4-0 win against Manchester United in 2019 with his late father and his children and calls it one of the happiest moments of his life. His kids flew in for events at the new ground. His mother was there too.
"Please, God, in my lifetime. One trophy. Anything."
Thirty years and counting.
