Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show. I'm Taylor Rockwell. Daryl Grove will be back with me tomorrow. He's out gallivanting around Virginia with some friends of his from England. And when I say galivanting, I of course mean carefully and calmly recuperating in the most responsible way possible. At least I hope that's the case. Instead of Daryl, I've called up Graham Ruthven of The Guardian and Eurosport. Graham has been on the show several times. It's always nice to have him on, and he's here to help me make sense of a fairly confusing La Liga table. Madrid are in crisis, even though they're in second. Barcelona are in somewhat less of a crisis, despite being even further back, though they were winning at time of recording, so maybe that helps a little bit. Still off to a horrendous start, though.

We take a look at all that has happened in the league so far, including some of the surprising

teams that are near the top and how Graham thinks it all might play out, as well as some

managers who could be on the hot seat who could be gone before the end of the season,

managers who may stay for the duration.

And at the very end, we even get into a little conversation about Iron Front versus Major League Soccer and all that's happened there. So without further ado, Graham, thank you so much for returning to the show. No problem at all. It's always fun to be on. That's good. I always like it when people start with. It's always fun as opposed to like, it's okay to be here or something like that. I't think we've ever gotten that one but i appreciate that it's fun i have lots of la liga questions

for you but i want to start uh in an obvious spot i would like you to explain to me why people in the

uk dislike james cordon to such an extent well james cordon uh yeah he definitely splits

opinion i would i would say there is there is actually quite a large number of people who do like James Corden.

He did a show over here called Gavin and Stacey, which was very popular.

It wasn't to my taste.

There's a weird divide going on between Scotland and England, so I'm Scottish and never

really caught on in Scotland, and yet in England it was huge. But then after that, he did a load

of kind of really bad films, a really bad TV shows, kind of like an early career welfare

slide. And then he's gone over to America to do his whole chat show thing and actually

do you know what he is better at the chat show thing but we don't get that on our on british

tv so british people still you know we have we have an opinion of them that's that's from about

five years ago so uh yeah but despite everything despite everything there you can you can just

keep them that we give you that one you know and if you want to take Pears Morgan back as well, you know, that's fine with us. James Gordon seems okay. I don't mind Carpool karaoke, but it does feel like so many people. I see that sentiment a lot from people in the UK, so I was curious. But no, you all are more than welcome to keep. Pierce Morgan. And with that said,

we should probably talk La Liga and move away from that one. I wanted to start at the top of the table. That's usually what we do. And it usually means we're talking Barcelona or Rao Madrid. This time, it means we're talking athletic club. How have they managed to claim the top spot through the first five games.

Yeah, I mean, they've kind of flown under the, under the, under the,

the radar a little bit, athletic club.

...