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

Today, we're looking at something that every single professional player does when they join a new team,

but something we don't know an awful lot about, the medical.

Why are player medicals necessary?

What do they consist of?

Are they perfunctory?

And what happens when a player fails them?

My name's Ryan Bailey, joining me today to put the cold stethoscope on the chest of this topic is Taylor Rockwell. Hello, I was ready for the misdirect of a thing every player does and then it was going to be like poorly juggle or something. I like that you went straightforward, Ryan. Yeah, I'm very literal today, I suppose. You're very welcome. Joe Lowry, hello. Hello, Ryan. I like how your voice gets deeper for the 101 intros and the TSS ones. He's like, hello, welcome to 101. This is very serious. I like it. I'm feeling serious. Let's do this thing. I try to do my more serious broadcasting tone on a 101, Joe. Is it working? I mean, I'm enjoying it. Yeah,

it's great. Your BBC voice. Yes, indeed. Graham Rudvan, this is my top gear voice,

where you go up like this and then you go down. Hello, Ryan Bailey. How are you? Hello, Graham.

I'm very good. Thank you for joining us. I'm very interested in talking about this topic today in medicals. The thumbs up picture from the medical, very famous picture we've seen many, many times, often a player wearing like denim jeans with no shirt on, with loads of wires on their chest doing a thumbs up. It's a picture we've all seen many, many times before. I'd like to dig into that process a little more in this episode.

I'll add at the top, by the way, I actually had a medical last week here in Rome, Italy,

because when you're doing...

You're signing Valacio.

I'm signing Valacio. I picked the right one in this town, yay.

Before you can join a gym or do any physical activity here, you have to have a medical certificate from your doctor. Wait a minute, wait a minute. What? I have so many questions. First of all, Lazio is the right one? Do you mean that literally? No, I don't. Although literally, I suppose if I'm still being literal tater, yes, you're right.

So even if you want to go to your local gym and go on a treadmill or something, you have to have a medical certificate because this is the land of ridiculous bureaucracy.

So I booked an appointment with a doctor to go and have my medical and for him to give me a certificate that I could present to my gym to sign up, which I've done. And I walked into the doctor's office. He says, what's your date of birth? I told him my name and my date of birth. And he goes, here you go. This is 35 euros, please. And I was like, okay, thank you for the certificate. When does the testing begin? He looked me up and down and went, you look healthy.

That was it.

That was the Italian medical.

So I would hope that the soccer medical is a little more stringent than that.

So Joe, if you don't mind leaning us into this topic a little bit, what exactly is a medical?

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