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My background playing soccer gave me a natural advantage over many of the American-born players.

While American football is very structured and linear and static - where everyone lines up, and there's a burst, and it happens - soccer is like the cosmos. It's like constellations. It's bodies moving in space. It's a very spherical game.

Like many a Yank before me, I have tried to explain to European friends that Americans actually know soccer quite well, that many of us played it in school and college, but that, well, we just don't find it quite as exciting as, say, what we call football.

I'm not as big a soccer fan as people might imagine, being British.

The way I grew up playing, and the way most Americans have grown up, is that you hit the ball up in the air and then it stops where it lands.

Baseball has long been a national pastime that many Americans have cherished.

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

At the moment there are some England players who are the stars of their club teams, but not for their country. It's difficult to explain.

And of course in America you've got American football and baseball and all those other ball games, soccer has become a little niche that the women have kind of filled.