Welcome to Soka 101, the podcast where we scratched the soccer itches.

You never knew you had.

Today's episode is inspired by a listener question from Steve Hidalgo, who wrote to the

Total Soccer Show and asked, why do little kids walk out with players before games?

What we want to know in this podcast is, who are these little kids?

What business do they have escorting professional soccer players onto the field?

My name's Ryan Bailey joining me to find out more about these youngsters and their role in

a beautiful game. We have Mr. Taylor Rockwell. Hello, sir. Hello, my friend. How are you doing?

I am very well indeed, Tate. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. I'm excited to talk about one of those things that we see all the time, and I never give a second thought to until someone asks about it. And then I realize I don't have an answer for it. Mascots and Football. Here we go. There we go. And to be clear, we're talking about mascots here. I haven't actually used the word mascot in this podcast yet, although it's in the episode title. but we should be clear from this top tater, but this is mascots as in small children leading the team out onto the field and not

grown men in silly cartoon character costumes. Yeah, no Gunnersaurus chat, no Fred the Red chat today.

We're talking about the little kids that come out pre-match, holding hands, occasionally,

like making faces at Joe Hart and almost always demanding

shirts or autographs from Lionel Messi. Indeed. And staring at him in awe as you would. Taylor,

before we get started, an obvious question for you is, have you ever been a mascot or soccer game?

I never have. New. I don't think I've ever even walked onto the pitch while a game was happening or about to happen. So no pitch invasions for me, no mascots either. Yourself? Juvenile pitch invasions. That's what we should call them. Mascots is too broad, isn't it? I like that. I've never been a mascot, Taylor, but my brother has a good story about how he nearly was a mascot.

So we are Wimbledon fans and back in a date, this is, we'll find out later on as we go

through this episode, but masquoting has been done for quite a while.

And the year, Taylor, is 1988.

My brother is nine years old.

He's sitting in the stands with my dad, getting ready to watch Wimbledon. The manager, Wimbledon's manager, actually came out from the tunnel and came up to my brother and said, would you like to be the mascot today? And do you know what my nine-year-old brother said at the time? Nah. No, too scared. Really? I mean, well, that makes sense.

I wish it was like he was holding out for a better opponent or something like that. But yeah, the nerves can overtake, I guess. I think that's a tricky situation when a grown man says, would you like to come and walk out in front of thousands of people who are shouting? If you had a few days of preparation for that, I can imagine my nine-year-old not wanting to do that ad hoc.

So it's certainly been going on. shouting. If you had a few days of preparation for that, I can imagine my nine-year-old not wanting

...