New York

Game-visiting Brits may be pissed off at the way pro games are accompanied by canned music and some twat on the tannoy giving play-by-plays (“Throw-in to the Red Bulls!”) or telling you who’s won the giant bar of chocolate and so on. All the time.

This isn’t just a football thing – it plagues all US sports. It’s almost as if the franchise owners are convinced that American spectators are drooling retards with the attention span of a weasel on crack.

This inevitably leads to a dilution of atmosphere – not just in football – but it’s here that you most you notice the lack of singing, chanting and the other carnivalesque features of a thriving roots-up fan culture. Even when ‘local’ rivals DC United are in town.

And until the Red Bulls get round to building their own dedicated (ie smaller) soccer arena you’ll have to get used to watching a game with an average of less than 10,000 fans rattling around in a stadium that seats 77,000. It’s kinda spooky.

This is changing and it isn’t true of all of the USA (the Red Bulls draw the second smallest crowds in the MLS) but if you’re in New York in the summer, you might be lucky enough to witness a game featuring visiting Euro-giants.

The sight of (quality) soccer starved ex-pat and US fans packing a season’s worth of enthusiasm into a single afternoon is an experience not to be missed.