“I feel like I just wandered into the soccer-themed bar mitzvah I never had,” said Roger Bennett, one-half of the Men in Blazers duo, seconds after bounding up onto the stage Friday evening to open the festivities at the first BlazerCon, a Comic-Con for soccer nerds.
Assembled before him at the Brooklyn Expo Center were hundreds of people — mostly 30-somethings, many of them men wearing the unofficial Men in Blazers uniform: a blazer, sneakers and a scarf bearing the colors of a favorite European soccer club. In the hall outside were Xbox stations loaded with the FIFA 2016 video game, a Topps booth with free packs of soccer trading cards, and more than a half-dozen wall-mounted flat-screen TVs that would soon broadcast the United States’ opening qualifying match for the 2018 World Cup.