Sometime in the mid-1970s, Kevin Keegan scored a bicycle kick and I became a Liverpool fan. Since then, I’ve followed The Reds around the world. Now I plan to write a book about global football fandom.

It was a Saturday in the fall of 2007 and I was heading into the vast and desolate Mongolian countryside. I had come here on assignment for National Geographic to do a series of environmental stories, including one on the country’s extremely harsh winter blizzards, known as the dzud.

I want to say I was focused on the assignment; that my head was filled with big questions about cultural survival and such. Questions to which I’d be seeking answers out there among Mongolia’s herders. But the truth is, driving through the rolling hills, my mind was elsewhere. Something else was gnawing on me.

I was going to miss the Liverpool game.

The Reds were playing later that day, a Premier League match. It must have been an early kick-off UK time because Mongolia was six hours ahead and the game was starting in the early evening local time. Our travel plans called for an overnight stay. I wasn’t sure exactly where we were going, but I knew we’d be nowhere near a city — or a television. There was no Internet access.

I had tried to change the schedule and stay another day in Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, where an influx of expats to the country’s booming mining business had led to a proliferation of Premier League-friendly sports bars in recent years. I had already scoped out an Irish pub in the city center where the manager had assured me that the game would be shown.

“Could we leave Sunday instead?” I asked Ganbat.

Ganbat was the translator joining me and a local researcher on the trip. Like many Mongolians, Ganbat went only by one name, in his case one that made him sound like someone who had just stepped out of Middle-earth — or stayed in it, since Middle-earth is pretty much what Mongolia, the least densely populated country in the world, looks like.

“Why?” he asked.

“I’d like to do some interviews in the city.”

“But it’s Saturday,” Ganbat replied. “People are not in their offices.”

He had a point, and in any case he had already made arrangements for us to interview several herders in various remote locations and it would be impossible to change those plans now.

“We can do interviews on Monday, after we come back,” he said.

I sighed. “I suppose so.”

In the past decade of traveling the world as a journalist, I had missed maybe a handful of Liverpool games. Before I went on a work trip, I would always check the Liverpool fixture list to make sure that my travel plans wouldn’t interfere with a game. Sometimes I had chosen lay-overs at airports I knew had bars showing the football. It wasn’t something I told my editors about.

In truth, it wasn’t that difficult to organize. Since its inception in 1992, the English Premier League had gone global in just a few years, aided by the immigration of foreign players — Cantona, Klinsmann, Bergkamp and Henry — to the English game. The EPL was living up to its hype as The Greatest Show on Earth and matches were televised everywhere you went in the world.

I had seen firsthand the English Premier League’s conquest of Africa, where, in the late 1990s, I was living and working as the Kenya-based correspondent for a US news magazine. Nowhere in the world had the EPL hoovered up new devotees as quickly and completely as on the African continent. Overnight, everyone seemed to be an Arsenal or Manchester United fan — Arsenal if you were a Nigerian, because of Nwankwu Kanu; Man Utd. if you came from anywhere else, because when picking a team, why not pick the most successful one?

I got used to watching the games on the road, in dark and dusty tin shacks where an entrance fee of 10 cents would buy me a few inches of space at the end of a crowded wooden bench, and where I had to crane my neck to catch the play on a blurry TV screen somewhere beyond a sea of heads. I caught a 4-0 Liverpool win over Derby in a hotel bar in Gulu, Uganda, while covering the deadliest Ebola outbreak Africa had ever seen. Emile Heskey scored a hat trick that day.

When my Africa stint ended, my wife and I moved to Los Angeles, where, on Saturdays, I’d slip out of bed at 7 a.m. to go downstairs to watch the match before heading off to play in my own weekend pick-up game. That’s if Liverpool didn’t play earlier, which meant my waking up at 4:30 am. Or later, which meant I had to skip the kickabout.

As a freelancer I was in charge of my own hours, and I could choose to watch the weekday Champions League game at lunch hour at the Fox & Hounds, a British pub across the freeway from Universal Studios that attracted a packed house of expats with similarly elastic schedules. It was there, in the dark-paneled backroom, where I experienced the euphoria of Istanbul.

When I began traveling regularly to Southeast Asia for work, my football-watching schedule flipped the other way, with games coming on late in the night. Catching them in restaurants and bars was no problem in places like Thailand and Cambodia. The popularity of the English Premier League had skyrocketed in Asia, with Liverpool enjoying a particularly strong following.

Every time I walked into a new bar and saw patrons sitting there in their replica shirts with Gerrard’s name emblazoned on the back, a feeling of belonging washed over me. I was among my people in a place where I knew the rituals and the vernacular. Oh, how reassuring to find these strangers in far-flung locales displaying the same kind of irrational interest in a football team as I did. As if all that time I spent following and thinking about Liverpool was not a waste, since there were people — real people — all around the world who did the same. Who had made the same irrational choice. We couldn’t all be wrong, could we?

Missing a Liverpool match meant disconnecting from one of the few routines my peripatetic lifestyle had not yet snuffed out. And so it was that on that Saturday afternoon in 2007, as I watched a young boy on horseback steer an enormous number of sheep across the Mongolian hills, my mind was firmly on what line-up Liverpool would field in a few hours’ time.

We spent the afternoon visiting a reforestation project and the site of a proposed copper mine, and from there we traveled farther west. Ganbat had arranged for us to meet with a nomadic herder who could talk to us about what it was like to see his animals through the harsh Mongolian winters.

The herder was living with his family in a ger, the traditional Mongolian tent home, situated far up on a remote mountainside, beyond any roads. When we finally reached there, the sun was already setting. The dying light illuminated a breathtaking view of the valley below. The herder must have both heard and seen us coming, because he and his wife — both dressed in a deel, the traditional Mongolian wool coat — came to greet us as we parked our car on the grass near a row of pens holding hundreds of sheep and cows.

“Tavtai morilogtun,” the herder said. “Welcome.”

An old man who had clearly weathered many a dzud, he gestured for us to follow him into the ger. I noticed that another structure had been dismantled and partly loaded on to a large wooden cart. The family was preparing to move down the mountain ahead of the coming winter. Then, as we were about to enter the home, I spotted something else. Mounted on a pole at the side of the ger was a large satellite dish with a cable running into the home.

Inside, the air was smoky and suffocatingly hot from the aging stove burning in the middle of the tent. But what caught my eye was the light flickering from the back. It was coming from a television, and I think I must have let out a muffled “yes” when I saw what was playing on it:

The Liverpool match.

It turns out the herder was an international scouser, just like me.