Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to MLS Assist, a podcast created to give insight into the tactical side of major league soccer.

I'm your host, Joe Lowry.

And this week I am joined by my co-host, Jordan Angelie.

Jordan, it's been a couple weeks.

How are you doing?

I'm doing well.

I enjoyed listening to you guys last week.

You and Elliott really held it down. It was so

interesting to hear that different side of soccer analytics. Elliot was fantastic. Listeners,

if you haven't heard that show, go back and listen to it. Elliot McKinley of American

Soccer Analysis really brought a lot of great information on data analytics and data collection

within Major League Soccer. And just in soccer in general, he brought all of that to the table. So definitely, a lot of great information on data analytics and data collection within major league soccer and

just in soccer in general he brought all of that to the table so definitely check that episode out

but jordan it's great to have you back this week i think we we deviated slightly from our normal

show plan but that's okay we've got a lot of time to explore different topics but this week we're

kind of back doing what we do we're this week we're going to get back into the tactical side of things, but with a little bit of a twist. Jordan, you and I spend a lot of time on the show talking about tactics and lineups set by coaches, but today you and I are kind of going to be doing that for ourselves. This week's show is the Joe versus Jordan MLS Tactics Showdown. Ooh, done, done, done, done. So you and I have picked 11 players.

We've each picked a starting 11 from one conference, not all from the same team, but all from the same conference. I've got the Eastern Conference and you've got the West. So first, we're going to walk through our lineups explaining what the reasoning was behind each selection. Then we'll go through how exactly we would instruct our respective teams to take on each other. That's the tactical side of it, right? We want to have this be not only like a draft sort of situation, but we want to take it one step further into the tactical realm as well. But there's one more wrinkle, Jordan. We're each picking a starting 11, not filled with necessarily the best all-star players, not that there won't be a few of those, but with our favorite players. It would have been a little too easy to just do those all-star teams, so I think the favorite player approach will be a little bit more unique. So we have to be able to justify why we like each specific player relative to other options of that position. And if we want to beat each other, our team full of favorite players is going to have to mesh better, a lot better than the MLS All-Star teams inevitably do when they play during All-Star weekend against a European giant. Jordan, I think we've covered it pretty well through this intro. Is there anything else that you want to touch on before we actually get into our lineups and tactics? We were trying to figure out a way to make this. So it was easily digestible for people listening.

And when you're going over a starting 11 and talking about specific players, we were like,

okay, what's going to be the best way that we can kind of compare and contrast as we're going?

So we're going to group the players into like-minded groups or like almost formation as we go about.

So I'll start with my goalkeeper.

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