Welcome everybody to soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and I am very excited to be here this week because we're talking an underrated league in an underrated footballing nation.

At least they were underrated.

Now maybe they're perceived as being very good, so they're properly rated.

Graham Ruffin, we're talking Uruguay.

Are you ready?

I am ready, Taylor Rockwell.

What you described there, I think, is known as the Giroux paradigm, where you're underrated to such an extent that actually there is a tipping point where you maybe become slightly overrated. I don't think Uruguay are at that point just yet. Who knows? They're always competitive. Nation of 3.6 million people always makes me very envious as a Scottish football fan

that we are a bigger nation than them and yet you look through their national team squad,

going back through decades and they just always have world-class talent.

So I'm excited for this episode because everyone knows they overachieve relative to their population.

They're always competitive, but I don't know how much is known about their league.

I certainly didn't know a massive amount before I started researching.

So we never pretend on these episodes in this series of deep dives into leagues of nations

that have qualified for this summer's World Cup.

We never pretend to know everything.

And that certainly can't be the case today because I was starting on like zero for

this league. But that's what makes these episodes and these journeys always exciting.

Could you have named more than one club prior to this episode?

Yeah, I could name the big two. That was it. Because the, so Penarola and National,

who obviously we'll talk more about as later in this episode.

They always get a mention when they play each other in the Uruguayan classical.

They always get a mention in the newsletter.

...