Hello and welcome to a brand new R-Splug RCast right here on R-Splug.com.

It is around 10 a.m. in the morning here Thursday morning in Los Angeles. I'm with Andrew Allen. Good morning, Andrew. Good morning. Feeling okay?

I'm okay. Yeah, it's been a hectic few days. It's been great fun, but yeah, very, very hectic.

If it does sound a little bit roomy, well, that's because it is. We are sitting in my hotel room.

We're sharing a microphone, so it is a little bit less than optimal for recording.

But of course, there was a big game last night in preseason, Arsenal beating Barcelona 5-3. That is basically what we are going to talk about throughout this podcast.

I just want to make a quick point about, I want to ask you actually about what you've seen out here from the tour, from the events that you've been part of.

The fans everywhere. I think there was a fairly even split of Arsenal and Barcelona fans, but if you ask me which bunch of fans were more cohesive or whatever, you'd have to say it was Arsenal.

Barcelona fans felt a bit more disparate, whereas there was more, I don't know if you call it a sense of community among the Arsenal fans, but it's been extraordinary since we've been here.

I think Barcelona fans in the stadium yesterday, a lot of them were local, Hispanic, Los Angeles residents who maybe didn't have as full on commitment to the causes, maybe the Arsenal contingent here.

I mean, everywhere we've been, the passion of the Arsenal fans has shone through.

Obviously, we had the fan event the other night and just listening to people talking about where they'd come from just for that occasion.

Obviously, then into the match as well. I mean, last night in the queue, we bumped into a guy who'd flown in from Calgary, was only in the country for 24 hours just to watch Arsenal.

And it's just, there were stories like that everywhere. And it's actually, I mean, it's also just very funny watching you and Elliot getting pulled around people asking for photos everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of mind blowing really. We're so far away and that really hits home every day when you're sort of down by the beach.

You're definitely not in England or Ireland. And yet you still see football shirts, Arsenal shirts. Yeah, it's been, it's just been really amazing.

I suppose we should talk about the stadium because I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in my life. And I've been in many stadiums, I've been in good stadiums and bad stadiums.

But people will have seen, I'm sure, pictures of so-fi stadium, they'll have seen videos of so-fi stadium. And I don't think I've seen one that quite does it justice in the sense of scale that it has, the views that it has from the seats.

We were on the fifth tier and yet somehow we were below street level. And it was a long way down to the pitch. And there was a long way up to the seats at the top.

There's this incredible screen that you, that wraps around the stadium. So depending on where you are, you're either watching the outside of the screen or the inside of the screen because it's projecting the same stuff to the sound.

It's like something from the future. And I know that probably sounds a bit obvious when someone spends five and a half billion or six billion dollars or whatever it costs to build this thing.

But I'm absolutely gobsmacked by that stadium and what it is. And just how, I mean, you go through it and you think, oh, I'm in a luxury shopping mall here. And then you go out and we'll talk about the pitch in a minute, but you go out and you see the green grass and all the people in there. It's just mind blowing.

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