Brooklyn to Host Blazer-Con, 'Soccer's Answer to Comic-Con'

The two widely adored, hugely sarcastic British dudes central to soccer’s rising popularity in America are taking the next rational step toward securing the sport a U.S. cult base: They’re starting a Con.

Blazer-Con, styled after San Diego’s world-famous Comic-Con, will unite ”the best global football minds” with “an audience of Americans from across the nation who have fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with the game,” according to the convention’s new website.

The event will be held on Nov. 13 and Nov. 14 at the Brooklyn EXPO Center in Greenpoint. Tickets cost $225 for one day or $425 for two.

“By day, BlazerCon will be a content-packed stream of keynotes and panels featuring some of the smartest minds in global and domestic football,” says the website. “By night, we will revel in a pair of MiB Live Shows featuring some of our favorite celebrities from the worlds of entertainment and US Sports.”

Or, in a phrase: ”There will be Football. There will be Beer. There will be Pies.”

The event’s sponsors reportedly include EA Sports (maker of the FIFA video game), Adidas, Mini (of Mini Cooper fame) and DUB Pies (hence all the pie-eating).

Men in Blazers, manned by Roger Bennett and Michael Davies, began as a Grantland podcast before migrating to ESPN and, most recently, NBC Sports. Bennett and Davies currently record their shows in a studio in SoHo, Manhattan.

So far, they’ve managed to coincide the explosion of their podcast’s fan base with the explosion of soccer’s larger fan base in America — and now, Bennett and Davies are taking the risk of assuming that base has reached at least break-even point.

“It’s a gamble, but we’ve paid witness to the rise of this game — this unstoppable rise, this love affair between Americans and this global game,” Bennett told the New York Times. “It’s definitely an investment, but it’s not one we’re concerned about.”

To a Wall Street Journal reporter, he said European teams and leagues are treating soccer’s surging U.S. popularity “like a gold rush, and that made BlazerCon the next logical progression for us.”

Get ready, Greenpoint. Middle-aged dads in shin guards are about to descend like a locust cloud onto the corner of Franklin and Noble streets.