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

Today, we're looking at one of the most common set pieces in soccer,

which happens at least twice per game.

If your opponent does it during gameplay,

usually a bad sign for your team.

It's kickoff.

So what is kickoff?

Why is it the way it is?

How has it changed?

And what is the best way to do it my name is ryan

bailey joining me to answer these questions and many more we have taylor rockwell wahay

way to you joe lowre way hey man i way i didn't realize we were going all wahay today i'm here

for it yeah i wasn't aware of this is a formal greeting but here we are nor was i but joe always says ahoy and i couldn't steal that but i needed to do something other than like hello in a very serious and somber way i mean hello's been around for centuries taylor it's okay you can still use it i'm just gonna keep it fresh every single time next time it's gonna be like ole like, Oleo, or however you say hello backwards. I didn't do it there. But you get the point.

Well, hello, Taylor, has been around for a long time, as has kickoffs.

Yeah. Excellent seg there. But like hello and greetings in general, it has changed a surprising

amount over the years. So why don't we kick off this show? We're going

to talk about kickoff, which is something which maybe we all take for granted. It's something

that's fairly automatic in the game, but it does have an interesting history. But before we

get to that history, Taylor Rockwell, can you lay out real quick what actually is a kickoff

when it's awarded and how does it work exactly?

Yes, when two soccer teams love each other very much, they come together, and then they kick

off and they start the game. Basically, the way it works, you will do your coin toss, you'll decide

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