Hey, it's producer Darrell here, introducing today's episode of MLS Assist.

The guest on today's MLS Assist is, well, me.

So it's Joe Lowry and myself getting excited about 10 players who will be new to Major League Soccer in 2020.

There's names you know like Chichorito and Alan Polido and Edison Flores.

And some names you maybe don't like Kenneth Vermeer and Leonard O'uso and Jiao Paolo

who'll be playing for Seattle Sounders.

Before we get into the details of all those players,

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notes.

Hello everyone and welcome to MLS Assist, a podcast created to help make sense of the tactical side of major league soccer.

I'm your host, Joe Lowry, and today I'm not joined by my co-host, Jordan Angeley.

Jordan is taking a well-deserved break after calling all of the United States women's national teams Olympic qualifiers. So instead, I'm joined by the Total Soccer Show's Daryl Grove. Daryl, how are you doing? Hello, I am honored to be on MLS Assist. It's great to have you. It's nice to have one of the voices who's been working so hard behind the scenes to make this thing happen actually on the show. Yeah, Yes. It's a little bit bold, right, to produce the show and then appear on it really soon. But here I am. I think it works for us. I already have one producer note for you. You've undersold what Jordan's been doing these past few weeks. She didn't just call the US game. She called every single game. Oh, goodness, you're right. That's why she needs a break. Yeah, she's earned it. She and I, she's been working, working really hard behind the scenes on this show and calling all those games. I know she's been putting in the hours on both of those things. So the timing this week was perfect to give her a little bit of a break and allows us to sort of get in here. Each of us did our research on some of some new players joining Major League Soccer and allows us to go back and forth on some of those guys. Yeah. So some of these names I literally had never heard of before and now I'm all excited about them. So this is the glory of preseason, right? It's when you get to know about these new names.

It's definitely a time of optimism.

And sometimes I feel like when I'm looking at these guys, I just assume they're going to be big things. And some of these guys will be. Some probably won't turn out as well. But just simply going through the process of analyzing them, hopefully we'll give our listeners a little bit of insight into who these guys are and what they can expect from them.

Yeah.

So in the title, it's going to be what, like 10 players, new to major league soccer that we're excited to see. But I already, spoiler alert, I'm definitely going to cheat, and I've got more than, more than five on my end. So it's going to be more like 12 players. I think that's a little bonus for everybody, and it'll work out just fine. So do we want to go ahead and get started with probably the biggest name that we're going to talk about on this one?

Oh, does that mean I'm at first then?

...