Is there anything worse than being an American ‘soccer’ fan?

New York

People are too into politics. I used to be called gay for liking politics in middle school. They should go back to that. No one used to care about politics. Now everyone’s into it and it’s made people insane. I think it’s partially to do with social media in general. I don’t really care about social media. I wouldn’t have it if I didn’t need it for my job. It just baffles me that there are so many people that are just screaming at, like, the Secretary of Agriculture all day. For $0, for no money. It’s probably because they don’t have jobs because the economy can’t absorb labor like it used to.

Similarly, podcasts need to die. It should be a humiliation to admit publicly that you listen to a podcast. I only listen to one podcast: Arsenal Vision, about the London “football team.” That’s the thing I’m a total nerd about. Of course, I was on a podcast for nine years with Nick Mullen and Stavros Halkias. Then Stav left. Nick said, very publicly, “We’re going to make a television show.” But we didn’t know anything. It was half a joke. And then it became real. On the podcast, I had been the nebbish. The joke was, “Oh, we’re gonna make Adam like a public intellectual, like he’s going to be like Dick Cavett.” But that has now become a real thing. I started getting better at interviewing. And I wanted to make something that felt like it was just different.

We had Sarah Jessica Parker on the show. I think her son was a fan of the podcast. I met him once. And then I ran into her on the street, last summer, and she said: “Adam, I love your work.” I was like, “What? Carrie from Sex and the City?” It was incredible. It was so gracious of her to do it. It did not benefit her in any way, shape or form. Sex and the City is endlessly fascinating to me. I think New York reflected the show more than the show reflected New York. There was a tsunami of some of the most useless people in the world moving to New York to be the cast of the show. It is funny to think they then found themselves having 12 roommates from Craigslist.

When I had Anthony Weiner on, I wasn’t trying to offer him a comeback story. I was just trying to understand. His was the first modern cancellation, as a result of Twitter and DMs, that was interesting to me. That he was caught out for sexting three times and then he went to prison. What is the motivation for someone like that repeatedly attempting to get elected? I didn’t want to be like, “Let’s get him to run for president.”

Typically I try to do a little small talk at the beginning of each episode. I brought up baseball and he got mad at me. I realized, “Oh my God, this guy argues about everything.” The internet is all people yelling at each other. That’s really not my intention with the show.

Being an American “football fan” is the lamest. I can’t go to a bar in New York on Saturday mornings anymore with other people. Everyone there is like Ted Lasso. For me, it’s a solitary, monk-like experience. I get up for the game early. Arsenal often ruin my weekend before it’s started. It’s kind of masochistic. Supporting Arsenal reminds me I’m going to die one day. I did go to a bar in London to watch Arsenal play Manchester City away. I was there doing shows and I tried as hard as I could to get tickets. I hit up famous friends of mine: “Can you try?” No luck. So my friend and I went to a pub in Islington, in the north of the city. My friend pointed at these old guys who kept disappearing to the bathroom. It took me a moment to realize what they were doing. Several 85-year-old men, snorting coke together at 4 p.m. on a Sunday. I thought: you’re going to die.

An Arsenal player gets sent off. Everyone’s furious about the refereeing. Instead of the way I feel watching Premier League football in New York, though, at this pub I’m thinking, “these losers are the same kind of people as me.” It was so beautiful, being around these ancient men doing drugs in the middle of the day.

And then, typically, John Stones equalized for Man City in the last minute. It made it more beautiful that we didn’t win. A brave ten-man away performance, crushed at the very end. We had to concede. Just being in that pub, I was thinking, was one of the most special days of my entire life.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2025 World edition.