Welcome to the Scuff Podcast where we talk about US Soccer.

Our guest is where we lawyer and a mediator who works at the University of Oregon and helps resolve sports conflicts.

Most of his work is with large complicated situations, but we thought he could help us think through the most famous conflict in US soccer right now.

With some ideas for strategy and best practice, he runs several different workshops but one of them is entitled difficult

conversations and another one is entitled dealing with an angry sports public. Maybe we can

get into that later. He does arbitration for the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland. He does

mediation for FIFA and arbitration for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, among other

things. Please welcome Joshua Gordon,

the founder of the Sport Conflict Institute.

Mr Gordon, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

I look forward to our conversation.

I always fun to dig in and give a little visibility into a space that a lot of people don't think about about how you deal with issues as they pop up in sport.

Right, I don't think a lot of us do think about it much.

I thought it would be useful again from sort of a best practices

perspective for us to start by you asking me what the facts of the case are.

Of course for our listeners it's no surprise. We're talking about the Giorana Greg

Berhalter situation, which is as yet unresolved. This would be a difficult conversation that needs to be had,

but there's also a lot more to it.

So what would you want to know, first of all, when you come into a situation like this?

Yeah, one of the first things is to think about what is the right tool in our toolbox that we'd even want to use.

When we're talking about issues in sport, we've got a whole array of tools that we might go to,

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