Hello and welcome to Libro, this, the 58 episode of the podcast about the most important of the least important things, as Marcus Aurelius famously said in Meditations.

Please be sure to like, leave ratings on Apple and comment if you support the podcast and want to continue in its best form.

I'm Miguel Delaney of the Independent and I'm joined today by James Horncastle of theic and Tarik Pangea of the New York Times.

Now today we're discussing something that's been in the background for quite a long time, but is

increasingly feeling like it's running through football, shaping it, guiding its destiny.

A bit like the force, really.

And that is the online world and whether the game itself is too online.

Now, yes, some of us on this podcast who have been made into memes are fully self-aware

of all this.

But there is something bigger going on that we want to discuss that, I would say, having

a manifest influence on football, actually tangibly affecting the way the game works.

But before we get into that, we better just suppose chat a little bit about how we're recording

today on Wednesday for a very specific reason in between

Champions League match days. And that's because straight after this, me and Tarrick are heading

to the glory of, I'd say, the decidedly non-Libro HQ that is Twickenham for Leaders Week.

That's right, yeah. It comes around quicker and quicker every year and you kind of drag yourself

to twicken them and you know what this i remember there was a highlight of this was i think almost

older than twitter or early twitter we're going to talk about social media was jack warner the arch

rogue of fiefer the vice president he showed up when leaders was in Stanford Bridge,

and he barriced the English FAA for trying to buy him and the others with mulberry handbags

for their wives. You think we're that cheap? Well, turns out they're not that cheap. But yeah, a few years later,

the indictment was unsealed. But yeah, leaders was a place that used to break quite a lot of news

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