I was introduced to Men in Blazers through the podcast around 2014, during the World Cup summer when American soccer interest briefly became impossible to ignore. I came to the Encyclopedia Blazertannica audiobook a few years later, and I remember sitting in my kitchen laughing at the section on celebratory knee slides loud enough to alarm my cat. This is not a book you can listen to quietly.
Roger Bennett and Michael Davies built the Men in Blazers brand on a specific premise: two English immigrants using the American vantage point to explain, celebrate, and lovingly mock the game they grew up with. The Encyclopedia Blazertannica translates that sensibility into reference format - alphabetically organized, structurally absurd, and genuinely informative despite itself. George Best, Maradona, Beckham, and Alexi Lalas get their due. So do the physics of knee slides. England's doomed World Cup songs receive the tragic treatment they deserve. The question of how professional footballers cope with hair loss is treated with the gravity it merits.
First, the Big Picture
What makes this book more than a novelty is what one reviewer called the immigrant dimension: interspersed among the jokes are genuine reflections on growing up in England, coming to America, and finding that soccer was a way of carrying something precious across that distance. Bennett's voice - even on the page, and even more so in audio - has that quality of deep feeling dressed in comedy. The best Men in Blazers episodes work the same way: the humor is real, but it's not a defense mechanism. It's how they love the game. The book captures that, and the audiobook makes it available in full.
Why Men in Blazers Present Encyclopedia Blazertannica Works as an Audiobook
Listening to Roger Bennett read his own work is a qualitatively different experience from reading it in print. His timing, his delivery of the more florid descriptions of Maradona or Messi, his willingness to fully commit to the bit on England's penalty curse - none of that translates to text the way it does to audio. This is one of those books where the audiobook is the primary object and the print edition is almost a transcript. The bonus podcast clip included exclusively in the audio version reinforces that framing. At under four hours, it also respects your time completely, which is a genuine virtue.
A Few Reservations
The encyclopedic structure means there's no narrative arc to follow - this is deliberately a collection of entries, some of which are longer meditations and some of which are glorified jokes. Listeners looking for a through-line story of soccer's rise in America will find those threads present but not sustained. The book also assumes at least some comfort with the basic vocabulary of the game - knowing who Maradona was, understanding what the Premier League is. The reviewer who described it as a starter kit for American soccer fans is right, but even a starter kit benefits from some prior curiosity about the subject.
The section on George Best might be the book's most affecting passage. Best was one of football's undeniable geniuses - a player whose talent was so obvious it needed no argument - and also a life that demonstrated with painful clarity how talent and self-destruction can coexist without resolution. Bennett handles it with the particular tenderness of someone who grew up with Best as an idea before he was a person, and who has had time to reckon with what that idea contained.
One reviewer mentioned attending the 1994 World Cup, which is the year soccer officially arrived in America in a way it hadn't before. The book orbits that arrival repeatedly - what it felt like, for English immigrants in particular, to watch Americans discover a game they had grown up treating as foundational. There's no condescension in the treatment. Bennett and Davies seem genuinely delighted that the game found new people to love it.
Who Should Pick Up Men in Blazers Present Encyclopedia Blazertannica
This audiobook is for American soccer fans at any level of devotion, and for anyone who has ever encountered the Men in Blazers podcast and wanted more of that energy. It works equally well as a gift for someone just getting into the Premier League or as comfort listening for a lifelong fan. It is emphatically not for listeners who have no interest in soccer whatsoever and are hoping the humor is sufficient to carry them through - though the immigrant-identity passages might surprise that reader into caring. For fans of the game, this is a pure pleasure.
