Welcome to Socker 101, the podcast where we scratched the soccer riches you never knew you had.

As we record, we're in the midst of the European preseason, where Europe's biggest teams are racking up the air miles, playing friendlies across the globe,

where players are training with teams they might not play for in a few weeks, and where Antonio Conte is making his players hate him by making them run really hard

in South Korea. In this episode, we're looking at preseason. What is it? What does it consist of?

Why do we have it? And how has it changed? My name's Ryan Bailey. Joining me for some

preseason fun and games, we have Mr. Taylor Rockwell. Hello. We have Joe Lowry.

Ahoy.

And Graham, rather than, hello Graham.

Hello, Ryan Bailey.

Hello, Graham. Let's start off Graham with a very simple, might be a slightly obvious question,

but why do we have a preseason in soccer?

So to strip it all the way back, and this may be very simplistic,

but this is our starting point, the purpose of pre-season is to prepare for the season ahead.

So once the season gets started, it's busy pretty much from August all the way through to

May, if you're looking at the European calendar or February through to November slash December,

if you're an MLS team or an American team.

So the month or two that you get on the training pitch in preseason is very valuable.

And it's pretty much the only block of training you have with players to communicate new ideas

or work in new strategies.

And yes, you can do that during the season,

but it's much more difficult during the season where you have games to contend with and you have

opposition teams to prepare for. So preseason offers managers an opportunity to raise the fitness

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