Narrowing it down

1) A team that I can root for without a translator
Not many options -- it's either England, Scotland or MLS (ha).

2) A competitive future
This automatically eliminates all the Scottish teams, bar Celtic and Rangers. In England, you can probably rule out the likes of Derby and Birmingham. Also depends on how competitive you want to be -- if you need to be in the hunt for the title, it's the Big 4 or bust. If you just don't want to be relegation fodder every season, you have more options.

3) A bar in New York City where I can watch games with other drunkards
Shouldn't be a problem for any of the English teams -- pretty much every English Premier League match is shown in the US, be it live or same-day-delayed. I don't know if all the Celtic and Rangers games are televised, but I would guess that most are.

4) A star player or two
Very subjective category. But just about every team in England has some players who would qualify as stars. Except for maybe Derby and Birmingham (see #2).

5) An interesting history
This will vary widely, but the majority of the clubs in England have been around for decades. Plenty of good stuff for you to chew on, once we get that far.

6) Cool uniforms are also welcome -- gotta look good when I'm hooliganing
We'll leave this till the end, as a kind of tie-breaker. Rest assured that there are no Oregon Ducks among the contenders.

Let me ask you a couple of other questions. Do you care about the home city (as in, no way I'm rooting for a team from Liverpool)? Do you care about the style of football (as in, I love watching 0-0 snoozefests)? Do you care about the type of fans the club has?

I'll think of more as we go.