Hello and welcome to Soccer 101.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and on today's episode, I'm going to paraphrase a question once posed by the great Ted Lasso.

How many competitions are in this season? A quick bit of

background on this topic. I put out a request for 101 suggestions on Twitter. Here's a

response that jumped out from at Madison Soccer. A question I frequently get from new soccer fans

is about the competitions. Domestic leagues, the Champions League, Europa League, and the Cups.

US sports are pretty much one league, one competition only,

so an explanation of how all that works might be good.

Thank you to at Madison Soccer for that question,

and I really, really agree because this is the exact type of question

Darrell and I started this podcast to answer.

If you've been into soccer for years, you could probably explain this one yourself,

but it does immediately get trickier than you'd think. So I'm going to attempt to explain a few

different competitions and their overall schedules, as well as which things are for club teams and which

things are for national teams. To start off, competitions like the World Cup, the European

championships, the Copa

America are examples of international competitions that feature only national teams. It does not

matter where you play your club soccer. If you're an Italian playing in the Netherlands,

if your manager or domineering corporate sponsor, as the case may be, selects you,

you're reing your country,

that's how it works. International competitions are mostly straightforward, so we don't need to spend so much time on them, which I believe was also briefly the policy of the US men's national

team in October 2017, but the less said about that, the better. Let's instead take a look at

...