Hey everybody, this is Richard Deich, and welcome to the sports media podcast with Richard

Deich. My producer, as always, is Lou Pellegrino. In studio guest this week, he has traveled

from his palatial state somewhere in New York City. And that is Sports Illustrated

senior writer Grant Wall, my longtime colleague, used to sit next to Grant Wall. He is here

not just to talk to me, Grant, are you? Grant, you can jump in in this intro anytime because

it never, it never goes well. You know what I find interesting about this is you may have tried to

wipe this from your memory, but we used to be on a podcast together when you hosted the Sports

Illustrated Soccer podcast. You know how many times I would get yelled at from mispronouncing German names?

Juventus.

I learned to just say juve.

All right, listen, Grant is here, obviously, to talk about soccer reporting, but let's get the plug out of the way, Grant, because I know you're itching for it.

Grant Wall has released a book. It is called Masters of Modern Soccer, How the World's Best Play

the 21st Century Game, that is in bookstores everywhere. And the book basically features

Christian Palescic, Chichorito, Iniesta. Who else, Grant?

Niesta is not in this book. He's not? I don't care. Anyesta is now in the book.

Roberto Martinez. And basically what Grant does, if I'm correct about this, Grant is you take

different sort of parts of soccer and you go very, very in-depth with these sort of grates at these positions, whether it's a defender or a goalkeeper or a manager, as to how they do what they do and how they do it successfully?

Yeah, it's based on George Will's classic baseball book, Men at Work, where he looked at the craft of baseball position by position.

So for me, I have seven figures in my book. Five of them are players. I have a

cross-section of people. Tell us the, tell us to people, just so people know. Yeah, goalkeeper is

Manuel Neuer, defenders, Vincent Company, defensive midfielder is Shabi Alonzo, Christian Polisic is the

attacking midfielder. Tichita Hernandez is the forward.

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