I see it more like American Football in the US with their High School Football teams. It's hard for someone to imagine how Big American Football is in the US. The best I could relate to someone is that it's like a religion. If you are Baptist you have one religion that you go to church on Sunday for an hour or two each week, and one REAL religion which you live...which is American Football.
High School is just the first block of bigger things...and it can be BIG for the local community. College Football rivals any football (Soccer) crowd that you will see in the UK...and Pro Football...that can be something else.
It's hard for people from outside the South to realize just how big College Football games can be. I lived in a town of 30K which was a college town...when a football game was a homegame the town grew to be 300K. It didn't matter that they couldn't all fit into the stadium, they'd just park anywhere and have a tailgate party listening to the game outside the stadium or whereever they could find. If you didn't reserve a hotel a year in advance, you weren't getting a room in town that day.
I moved out of that town eventually to a nice little country town with no college. In that town on Friday nights, the High school had 20K people trying to all crowd into it...in a town of 30K (yeah, I seem to like that size of city sometimes I guess).
Doesn't matter where I go in the US, American Football seems to be a big thing, even the local teams.