Change isn't coming. It's already here. Commerce is going digital and tax complexity is multiplying.

Tax rules evolve, rate shift, data floods in. Vertex connects it all.

A global tax compliance platform powered by tax-ready data and intelligence systems.

Smarter tech, continuous tax compliance, built-in confidence.

Learn more at vertexinck.com. Welcome back to full-time with Meg Lennahan. I'm Meg. You are listening to a show all about women's soccer on the Athletic Podcast Network. We are here in Washington, D.C., ahead of the NWSL Championship, and we're doing something a little different. I've got a fancy new recorder. Hopefully it works, and I'm about to bop around Media Day with two teams and bring you all sorts of different viewpoints on Saturday's championship match between the Portland Thorns and Kansas City Current. Full-time with Meg Lanhan is presented by Klarna the new smart way to pay when you shop online for tickets, team merch, and more. And if you don't have your ticket for the NWSL Championship, get on that right now. All right, before we get to the rest of today's episode, as always, you can show your support full-time plus get all of our women's soccer coverage and everything else the athletic has to offer on our entire site and app. You can subscribe right now at theathletic.com slash full-time. It is always one of our very best deals. All right, it is championship mode here, so the full new section will return next week. But in the meantime, don't forget that you're tuning into the big game on Big CBS for Paramount

Plus. It is in primetime at 8 p.m. Eastern, and we will be on site from Audie Field, of course.

Let me walk you through the experience that is an NWSL Media Day. We were in this building right on

the river in Washington, D.C. And it's probably the smallest room we've ever been in

for one of these NWSL Media Days. So there is going to be a lot of background noise. But it was just

honestly a very loud event. You have a full team meeting media. You have MasterCard bringing in

junior reporters. It's a little chaotic to say the

least so first team up kansas city first i headed over to the table with c cizer and isabel

rodriguez they're like a high power you know they've scored the most goals in the league so

you know that you're going to get a lot of pressure from them and a lot of creativity in and around the box and Matt's been telling us they like to hit balls from outside the 18 you know they've scored bangers like look at their last two goals so we just got to be ready for that and ready to just see shots from anywhere really and like their runs in the box are good they just have a lot of creative players I think too you can see from our last game we played against them like it went all the way down into the last minute of the game so i think that's kind of what you can expect like no team's going to give up no matter if they're upper goal or down a goal so it'll be exciting for sure i mean i think with playoffs we've seen this sometimes you've seen like very caging playoff games and that is not we have

got this year do you think there's going to be something happening or like early goals have been

yeah yeah they really have i feel like last game um we all talked about how we just kind of felt

like we were all over seattle at the beginning in the rain and how they just were like

didn't really expect the pressure

and I think that maybe that came from them having the three weeks off and whatever and just us coming like

off the game and you saw it in Houston too like there's just a lot of high pressure and like she said like

things are going to the last minute like literally the first minute to the last minute and I think

you've seen that in all the games

...