My appreciation of the sport increased after several years of watching my daughter play club and then high school soccer, but I can certainly understand America’s lack of interest. For long stretches of time, it appears that nothing happens, but if you watch closely, there is all sorts of maneuvering and strategy that leads, chess-like, to scoring chances.

In fact, the 1-1 tie between U.S. and Italy featured plenty of drama, including the teams playing down a man or two and a bloody elbow that resulted in an ejection. The sport’s popularity around the world, especially in Europe, is understandable, given the more contemplative, long-view of civilization held in the old country, where events don’t necessarily reveal their significance right away, but work into something in the long run. With the U.S. kicked out of the tournament by Ghana, my interest has certainly waned.

I’ll have to latch onto a favorite if I’m going to spend any time at all on this, but while at the Spanish-language Entravision offices recently, I was duly impressed when everyone gathered for an impromptu party to watch Mexico play on the flat-screens in the conference room, while ex-Pistol Steve Jones literally wrapped himself in a Union Jack bath towel to celebrate England’s advance into the Round of 16.

But if the U.S. continues to flame out in international play, the sport called football by the rest of the world has two chances — slim and “nil” — of ever succeeding here as a major sport.

The Feeling, Twelve Stops and Home (Cherry Tree/Interscope)

This U.K. avant-MOR quintet has already scored a pair of hits in its homeland with “Sewn” and the current “Fill My Little World” evincing a sound that unabashedly evokes such pure pop for now people as Queen, Supertramp, the Cars, the Beach Boys and especially 10cc.

The tunes from their debut, which will be released in the U.S. this fall, sound like harmless pop ditties until you dig a little below the surface to discover a song like “Sewn” is as sinister as the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” with lines like “You’ve got my heart in a headlock/You stopped the blood and made my head soft” and a creepy-crawly video that features the bandmembers literally being sewn together, with the thread seen running through their veins. What seems like a retreat is actually an aesthetic statement, glorying in glistening, Raspberry-like harmonies and lush melodies that sound like they could be outtakes from Pet Sounds or a Wings album.

The results are delivered with a po-faced seriousness that hinges on tongue-in-cheek or camp, though, as heartthrob singer Dan Gillespie puts it in “Sewn,” “Gimme the song and I’ll sing it like I mean it/Gimme the words and I’ll say them like I mean it,” which he does, elevating this from kitsch to something a whole lot more affecting. Consider this the return of the Neo-New Romantics, finally providing an answer to the question, “Whatever happened to Spandau Ballet?”