Hello,

Hello, Hello everybody and welcome to another Americans in Action episode of the Total Soccer show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

Joining me today is a man who is not selected in the Charlotte Expansion Draft.

It's Joe Lowry.

Joe, are you hurt you weren't picked?

Are you excited to get back to your parent club who made you available in the first place?

Taylor, I am thrilled, honestly, to not have been selected.

Just think about how weird that would be, right?

I know that drafts are an inherently American sports kind of thing, but every time the

expansion draft comes up, I reminded of how weird that is.

And MLS and how weird it is for a lot of other sports, the potential of just being plucked from the city that you live in, from your house, like from all of these things to then have to move across. It's just bizarre to me. So would playing for Charlotte C be the worst thing? Absolutely not. I'm sure there be a lot of great parts there. But man, in this fictional world, I'm kind of glad to just be able to stay at home where, like, my family

and the rest of my stuff is. I mean, that's said, with Ryan Bailey moving to Rome, there is a vacancy in the TSS Charlotte office. So maybe we do need to allocate you to Charlotte and then we'll have to fill in the gaps in Phoenix. Okay, I'll make the move, Taylor. We'll get Graham to Phoenix

and see how he deals with sunshine and not Scottish people. Yeah, I think that would be kind of fun. I think he would be briefly more pleasant and then extremely less pleasant once we got to the like 110 degree days where you can't go outside. Yes. Yep, that sounds. We also don't have munchy boxes here, which I think might be a bit of a snag for him, so who knows?

Yeah, that feels to me like if you just went to every fast food restaurant and got one thing and then threw it all into a box.

That seems to be what those things are, but I'm not Scottish, so I can't say for sure.

Yeah, that feels about right.

Arby's curly fries, a water burger, there's just all sorts of opportunity.

I like it.

I like it. Well, on today's show, we're going to be discussing the many, many Americans who were in action this past weekend. I'm going to assume not eating those munchy boxes, as well as a few who were not in action. We're also talking a bit more about the U.S. men's national team.

But first, let's stick with that expansion draft for a couple more minutes.

Charlotte used five picks. They kept three players traded for two for a whole bunch, or traded two of the players for a whole bunch of gam. And I think, Joe, do your point about it being strange that you can just be plucked from one city and put into another? I feel like it would be even weirder to be plucked from one city, put into another. Start maybe like doing some research on the city and potential real estate areas. And then suddenly you're now in a different market, as was the case for Tristan Blackman, who was taken from LAAFC, then traded to Vancouver. and Ismail to Jury Shradi, selected from NYCFC and then traded to LafC.

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