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Dear Typical American Sports Fan: I know you must think you have it pretty good right now, what with college football consuming your Saturdays, the NFL taking care of Sundays and Mondays, the World Series interspersed throughout the week, and basketball raring to go. These are all good things, but you’re missing out. It’s as simple as that. Sure, football and baseball and basketball are all pretty cool and quite satisfactory diversions from the perils of reality, but there’s more. I’m talking real football (soccer, as we Yanks call it), the beautiful game. It’s the most popular sport in the world, and with good reason. Well, a good number of reasons actually. Here I humbly submit five for your approval, which, if embraced, could quite enjoyably transform the landscape of American sports.

1. Relegation/promotion: This is without question my favorite concept in European soccer. Every season, the three teams with the fewest points in the league get sent down to a lower league (with much less prestige) for the following season. It’s kind of like being sent to the minors, but it happens to the entire team. It’s a collective punishment for a job poorly done. Correspondingly, the three teams with the most points in the lower league get bumped up a level. That’s not as fun. Think about it. Relegation is the ultimate slap in the face for an organization. It’s like saying, “You guys suck too much to play up here. We don’t want to bother with you next season.” The ramifications are awesome. In the last few weeks of every season, the bottom five or so teams are literally fighting for their survival (and financial future) in a relegation battle. This transforms matches featuring the league’s worst teams into truly compelling stuff. Considering the American implications of such a system is an exercise in pure, unadulterated joy. Baseball? See you later, Tampa Bay, Kansas City and the Cubs. Football? Miami, Arizona and Detroit, it’s been nice knowing you. Basketball? The league will be better off without Portland, New York and Atlanta anyway. The prospect of relegation keeps things fresh and dynamic, and I would love to see Matt Leinart’s face when he learned that his Cardinals were headed for the drop. Of course, this system would require some reshuffling and a creative fashioning of lower leagues and divisions, but it would be so worth it in the end. Nothing, and I mean nothing, beats a relegation battle.

2. The commentators: Nothing beats a relegation battle, but the announcers come close. Ask people who their heroes are and you’ll hear the same tired answers over and over again. Abraham Lincoln. Martin Luther King, Jr. Mahatma Gandhi. Mother Teresa. Ask me? Ally McCoist. John Motson. Andy Gray. Clive Tyldesley. These men are some of the finest soccer commentators in the world, known best to me for their work in the FIFA video game series, and known best throughout Europe for their work as real live commentators. Sometimes I struggle to understand exactly what they are saying, but it all just sounds so much better in the British accent. Take, for example, the phrase, “He just wants to score goals.” Pronounced in an American accent, it’s just okay. But add the British flavor and maybe an exclamation point, and you’ve got the stuff that dreams are made of. And perhaps the greatest thing about their announcing style is that you can use it on just about anything. Your roommate moves from his chair to his bed to read? In the accent, it sounds more like: “Well, uh, he’s found something clearly unsatisfactory with the chair and he’s made his way for the bed. Really cracking stuff we have here...” I feel American sporting events need to institute a quota of British commentators, regardless of their purported knowledge. It’s just something that needs to happen.

3. FanZone: So there’s this show on Fox Soccer Channel called FanZone. It’s shown once a week and it might be one of the best shows on television. FanZone takes two (perhaps inebriated) fans of rival teams and allows them to do commentary for a match between their teams. Hilarity ensues. I’ve read columns before that have claimed this would most certainly work in America, yet it still hasn’t been done. Why not?

4. Cups: One of my favorite things about soccer is that it combines two essential elements of sport, both rewarding teams for their performance over the course of the entire season and mixing in a playoff element. In American sports, a team can get hot at the end of the season, sneak into the playoffs, and then steamroll its way to a championship, while another team that has had prolonged success over the duration of the season could catch an unlucky break and then have nothing to show for its efforts. Here’s what happens in the English Premier League. There are 38 league matches, and the team with the most points at the end of those matches is the league champion. The first match matters just as much as the 38th, and that’s pretty special. Additionally, there are a number of cups that teams compete for. In England, a team can compete for the Football Association (FA) Cup, the Carling Cup and the Champions League trophy (a Europe-wide tournament). These are generally single-elimination tournaments. The FA Cup, for example, is a tournament featuring teams from every division of professional English soccer, and it allows for some of the most stunning upsets in sport. Imagine if the Bakersfield Blaze beat the New York Yankees. It’s kind of like that.

5. A delightfully fickle media: Remember when Wayne Rooney bought his fiancee an elephant for Christmas? I do, because the British media reported it. Remember when a member of the media posed as a Saudi sheikh and duped Sven-Goran Eriksson into discussing something he shouldn’t have discussed? That was fun. Remember when we thought Thierry Henry was leaving Arsenal because his brother’s girlfriend’s sister’s dog barked so? Me neither. But you get the point. The British media seems to have no shame, and I have a good time with it. In America, sports media in particular seems to take itself much too seriously. It’s sports. It’s fun. Let’s report about elephants. And let’s get ready for some real football. You won’t regret it.

E-mail Regan at dregan@media.ucla.edu.