The breakfast burritos get made the night before. By the time the first whistle blows at 6am Central, Joe has been up for an hour, pulling them out, getting the TVs fired up. Most of Green Bay is still asleep. The Packers do not play at dawn. Football, on the other hand, does not care what time it is in Wisconsin.
Joe, the owner of Green Bay Casuals, is 49 this year. He has been involved in the game his entire life. Playing, coaching, officiating. He chose academics over an athletic scholarship, though he reckons it could have gone either way. “This was pre-MLS, pre-academies,” he says. “Basically, if you weren’t on the Olympic scouting team, then after college, you were done with your career.”
“No one is Irish until St Patrick’s Day. The World Cup will bring that day. What it won’t necessarily produce is the day after”
The bar name is deliberate. Casuals, in British football, means something specific: the terrace subculture that emerged in the late 1970s, when fans turned up in Stone Island and Aquascutum rather than scarves, a form of tribal identity that had nothing to do with replica shirts. Joe chose the word knowing exactly what it carried. That he is 49, runs the only football bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and named it after a distinctly British phenomenon tells you most of what you need to know.
The bar itself is built around the same logic. No deep fryers, no silverware, no rolled napkins. They make their own pizza, do wings and chicken tenders, and the breakfast burritos cover the early kick-offs. The beer list runs from local Wisconsin craft ales through to international selections most Green Bay bars would not stock. “People are like, ’Oh, Stella, what’s that?’” Joe says. “And it’s like, I mean, it’s okay, right? It’s the Budlight of London or whatever.” He has leaned into mocktails and non-alcoholic beers too, for the fans who are there at 6am for the match rather than the pint.
Opening the bar at all was a choice made against the evidence. “Knowing all of those negatives,” he says, “I went ahead and opened the bar anyway because I kind of have a perception of if you build it, they will come. We need to get all the ragtag supporters that are out there.” West Ham, Liverpool and Tottenham fans, scattered across a city whose sporting identity begins and ends with the Packers, all of them wondering where to go on a Saturday morning. “I’m like, where are you guys? What are you doing? Where are you meeting at?” After two years, the same faces are showing up.
Some of those faces are younger than him, and they got here through a different door entirely. “You get introduced to the sport through FIFA, the game, it has really influenced a lot of people one generation below me.” A customer walks in wearing a Spurs shirt, Joe asks why, and the answer comes back: they recognised a player from a FIFA game years ago, started following the club, and stuck with it. “I might know Adams, I might know Matt Turner,” he says, testing the ceiling of most new fans’ knowledge. Deep stats, rivalries, the second-string midfielder in La Liga, that fluency has not arrived yet. “The popularity hasn’t hit like it has for American football or even baseball.”
When you raise the numbers, Nielsen forecasting a 62 per cent rise in US soccer interest off the back of the 2026 World Cup, Joe listens, nods, and reaches for an analogy. “Here’s my experience. It’s like St. Patrick’s Day, right?” he says. “No one is Irish until St. Patrick’s Day, unless you’re actually Irish. And then St. Patrick’s Day comes and it’s like everybody is Irish for a day.” The World Cup will bring that day. What it will not necessarily produce is the day after. “We are hardcore,” he says of the genuine supporters community. “I know the same 25 people that I can go to any US match, any time, any day of the week, any weather, and I will find those same 25 people.”
The deeper problem is structural. There is no grassroots. No Sunday league feeding a seventh tier feeding a sixth. “Everybody latches on to a Premier League team,” he says, “and we just built a division one league. We didn’t grow it from tier four to tier three to tier two. Money came in and said: boom, you have a top five international league. It’s like, no we don’t.”
He is equally direct about what American fan culture does to a club’s fortunes. “We are fickle fickle sports fans. Whatever team we support, they have to take first or they’re the worst.” He has seen fans drift away when form drops. “They’re not going to get up at 6am and support their team if they’re not winning.” It is said without contempt. More like recognition.
There is also the question of choice versus inheritance. In Britain, you do not pick a side. “It’s where you’re raised. It’s what your father or your mother supports. That’s your team. And you don’t get a choice.” In Green Bay, there are Packers fans and Bears fans living on the same street, purely out of stubbornness. “I have a choice to choose which team I support. In most other countries, places in the world, you don’t.”
Joe has been to matches on both sides of the Atlantic. The gap in atmosphere is not subtle. “The American fan is half involved with watching the game and half involved with the concessions and all the pomp and circumstance. The fireworks. The halftime show.” What you do not get is the noise. “Americans don’t chant. We have the supporter sections, the American Outlaws. They try. They try at their damnedest. The songs are repetitive. They’re short. They’re dumb. They’re borrowed from other cultures.” Brazil and Argentina were something else altogether. He speaks of the energy in the La Bombonera stadium in Buenos Aires,
“It’s this concrete half dome and the whole thing was shaking. The entire time I was going through the corridors, I’m like, is this safe? Like, this does not feel safe at all.”
Joe’s son is 11 years old. He has already supported Chelsea, then Fulham, and now says he is Man City – because Man City are near the top of the table. Joe describes it with something between exasperation and affection. “He’s 11, so he wants to see the wins.” Not quite the inherited loyalty that gets passed down in Liverpool or Dortmund. Not yet. But Joe, who opened a football bar in Packer country on a hunch and pre-makes burritos at midnight for a 6am kick-off, is not especially worried about that. He has got time and maybe that’s just what football needs in the US.
