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

Our guest today is Rio Nakagawara, who covers Japanese football in serious detail on his newsletter, Shogun

Soccer. He's a data scientist. He's going to help us preview next week's friendly with Japan.

Ryo, welcome to scuffed.

Yeah, it's nice to talk to you, Adam. I'm really honored to be on scuffed.

Thanks, man. So Japan beat South Korea about a month ago in the final of the East Asian Cup.

And I noticed there's not a lot of sort of the big names in that game. Can you give us a sense of what that competition is where it fits into the grand scheme of things?

Right. So it's basically like a sub-confederation cup within Asia, right?

So it's just all of the East Asian teams.

So like Japan, China, South Korea, you know, Hong Kong.

And then you also have like Guam and Mongolia and North Korea, among other teams, right?

So, you know, in the past it was pretty serious because, you know, especially for Japan and Korea,

both teams had all of their best players playing in this competition, and it was a pretty serious thing.

But of course, in recent decades, especially in the past decade or so, it's really kind of dropped in importance.

The tournament usually falls on a non-F FIFA calendar match day.

And on top of that, a lot of the best players from Korea and Japan all play in Europe now since the tournament

falls outside the FIFA match day calendar.

You can't really call them, forcibly call them up anymore.

It's basically become like a B, C team tournament for both teams where it's like a kind

of like a proving ground or testing ground for the domestic league players

for both the J League and the K League.

Also, like, not that great because China is supposed to be like, you know,

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