ONE37pm: What’s your relationship with football? When did you first discover it?
Nathen: Growing up in England, football was always culturally present. It’s an inescapable presence that follows you everywhere. Even if someone doesn’t enjoy sport, football in England is everything. For me, football really came later in life. As a child, I grew up obsessed with players and teams—like a lot of other kids my age. Though once I discovered music and MySpace in my teens, everything changed.
In the UK, it felt impossible to attach myself to both rock/alternative music and also football. In my teenage moment, you were either a “mosher” (a derogatory term used to describe those interested in rock music) or a “chav” (those dressing stereotypically in tracksuits, loving football). Every generation of youth has had their own sparring demographics, but I felt inclined to take a break from what I perceived to be a pretty awful cross-section of pop culture football fandom and attach myself to American alternative music and a burgeoning emo scene. It was only later in life—my late teens and early 20s that I came back full circle to enjoying football on my own terms, filled with newfound self-confidence, and was able to enjoy the game in a way I hadn’t been able to before. That manifested in enjoying football through a lens of culture, community and creativity, not so much the way I thought of football previously which was toxic masculinity, aggressive behavior and alcohol.
ONE37pm: Favorite team?
Nathen: My fandom of a singular team took a pretty hard turn at the crossroads of my relationship to football. I committed a cardinal sin in the eyes of a lot of people and fairly heavily switched the team I followed. For context, I grew up in the North of England, in Cumbria— the Lake District. People where I was from typically supported Carlisle United (the only professional team in my county), or they went further afield (likely Newcastle United as the closest ‘big team).
I was a Newcastle fan.
As a ‘90s kid, Newcastle [was] flying high and vying for Premiership titles with the biggest names and most attractive football on offer. Though, once my fandom of football waned, so did my love of Newcastle. When I came back around to football, it was pretty quickly a profession and not just a fandom. I worked for a few teams and was very lucky to be around some great moments in sporting history.
I worked for the New York Cosmos in 2013/14 when they came back out of hiatus and won a Championship in their first season playing in 30+ years, and then, somehow, I found myself at Leicester City during the greatest story in the history of professional sports anywhere in the world. I worked for Leicester for two seasons, 2014/15 and 2015/16— the latter going down in history. Needless to say, I now have two Leicester tattoos and an unbreakable bond with the Foxes.
ONE37pm: What’s your goal for Where Is Football?
Nathen: It was always designed to bring people together, deliberately or not. We wanted to tell stories and showcase the world through the lens of football. The established cliche of “we're more alike than we are different” feels especially true when talking about football and how we all watch and understand the game; the Where Is Football project was always meant to highlight that. In that vein, the goal has never really changed.
I will say that our creative ability has grown hugely over the years and we are more competent than we've ever been with how we service those stories. I think while our aim to tell human stories and connect people has never changed, our passion to tell them with different creative mediums has.
ONE37pm: How does the culture surrounding football differ in America and the UK?
Nathen: This is a question that could never finish being answered. The differences often seem never-ending, but at the same time football culture is so globally similar that it translates very naturally. I think a lot of the differences stem from the larger cultural differences between the two countries.
A lot of soccer culture in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s was so similar to (and often more developed than) Europe because of mass immigration. This history-focused approach is often forgotten about in lieu of a divisive and competitive mentality, though.
I think now that we have a solid 50-year history of highly-competitive domestic American soccer, we're seeing the fruits. Teams and players being competitive on a global scale, America winning World Cups, celebrities being born from the game and more. All of the awareness is now contributing to a worldwide acceptance of, and respect towards, American soccer in a way that wasn't often admitted even ten years ago. This is something other countries (and the UK) have had for a long time, so football culture can only grow, especially with soccer’s place being more established in the American sporting landscape.
