Welcome to the Planet Football Podcast. I'm Grant Wall and our guest today is a good one.

Mike Piazza is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame

and the all-time home run leader among catchers

in Major League Baseball history,

but for our purposes,

he also became the owner in June of Regina, currently in the third tier of Italian soccer.

Thanks for joining me, Mike.

Ran, it's a pleasure. I'm a huge fan of your work, so this is very excited to be talking with you.

Well I'm psy to talk to you and I want to start with a story of the last time I saw you in

person actually was at the South Apollo Airport at World Cup 2014

when you were just sitting having a coffee and in the airport and I assume following Italy were you on your way to an Italy game?

Yeah, I was on my way to Manaus actually which was very interesting.

You know I was traveling with a friend of mine and we had, we watched the first game,

Brazil Croatia, which is a really great game, and then went to Manaus and then from Man house, you know, connected back through Mexico to get home.

But yeah, I mean, it was definitely a lot of fun.

In Brazil, it was very interesting in country and obviously a lot of passion for football soccer.

So it was, I figure, you know, there's one of those bucklet things to watch a World Cup game in Brazil, so I just jumped on the plane and it was it was crazy fun.

So what is your personal history with the sport of soccer?

Yeah well I grew up in Philadelphia area grant and you know it was kind of one of those

things as a kid I played it soccer a little bit and that was just when that sort of the any the original North American Soccer League was, I would say probably at its height

in the 70s, you know, obviously with Pele, but the team in Philly was called the Fury and my

dad actually took me down to a few games and you know don't ask me about one

...