Welcome to the scuff podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer.

Our guest today is writing a book about the U.S. national team.

He is a regular contributor to The Guardian,

writing mostly about soccer, and he's a journalism professor at Marist University in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Leander, Shirelockins. Welcome to Scuffed. Very pleased to have you here.

Hey, guys, I'm really glad to be on. I'm a long-time listener.

What an honor for us. Thanks for coming on. I'm very excited to talk to you.

You do a lot of the thinking for me whenever a roster drops or a game has happened.

I can sort of suspend some of my own thoughts until I've listened to you guys and have a good

feel for what I should have noticed myself, but maybe didn't have the wherewithal to

realize.

I do not know people are doing that.

Because we read, that's what we do with people are writing.

We might just have a feedback loop going here.

Yeah, a bad one.

So how much harder has Burrhalter's firing made writing your book?

Well, a book was done, and you can rest assured that I brought this complaint to people at the Federation saying,

guys, if you're going to do this, do it before a book deadline, not afterwards.

So there was some rewriting and re-reporting and some additional work that had to be done and some restructuring and all the restructuring and all the rest.

I'd like to think that the book is better for it.

But it certainly complicated

that whole process, especially because I'd gotten really great access to Greg Burrhalter.

...