Welcome, everybody to soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and this week we're talking fairy tales. I was initially very excited to go in-depth on Mother Goose and The Real Little Mermaid, but then Graham Ruthman demanded, we exclusively talk about soccer fairy tales. I'm less familiar with those, Graham. Do they involve, like, children being tricked into walking into the woods to follow candy? Or is it kind of a different sort of fairy tale we're going for you? All my notes are about Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel, so I'm a little bit worried right now. That would have been the way to go. Cinderella would have been the best kind of crossover for this one. But no, we're talking about fairy tales and soccer. Graham, what do we mean when we talk about that term? Yeah, so I've always been slightly confused by the use of the term fairy tale in sports because I have a five-year-old daughter and I have never read her a bedtime story about someone scoring a stoppage time winner to win a trophy. Maybe I miss that whole genre of children's stories. I would find those more entertaining than the ones I have to read to her at bedtime. I don't know about you, Taylor. I thought about like trying to make famous moments in soccer into stories, but

ultimately they don't work that well because they're either very brief or way too convoluted.

So they don't work out so well yet. I haven't really found a way to crack that code quite yet.

It would be fun to combine soccer and Jacked beanstock beans and all that good stuff.

It might disrupt the playing surface a little bit.

I don't think football fairy tales would make actually like good fairy tales.

Like my daughter, if I was like, and then they scored two goals in stoppage time and won the trophy having been in the division below the season earlier

she'd be like is that it? I don't think there's much like fantasy going on there.

It is a weird term though to use for sport. Like on the surface it isn't. It makes sense.

It's like a thing you didn't expect to happen. But to for it to be a fairy tale that is sort of

never really rooted in reality, always rooted

in, like, mysticism and myth and fantasy tales, it is an odd one to go for with sport, but I

think it's meant to convey just how unlikely a scenario might be.

Yeah, according to Wikipedia, it is a fairy tale in soccer or sports is, quote,

a situation in which a competitor achieves far greater success than would have been reasonably expected.

So it's essentially to what you were saying, Taylor.

Essentially something that you never thought would have been possible before the start of a season or a period in time happening.

It's the longest of long shots happening in

sports. I think what really makes a football fairy tale

is the quick snap from

adject failure or farce

to glory. So I think

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