Hello, hello, and welcome to the Total Soccer show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

I am excited to talk about a whole lot of Major League Soccer.

If you, like me, have not been doing a particularly good job of keeping up with the league this season, then this episode is for you.

That said, if you have done a good job of keeping up the league, hopefully it will still be for you.

We're going to be taking a look at every team in the playoffs, giving you some things to look for on the tactical side, but also reasons to be excited about each and every team.

We shall do our best here with me to provide all that information are two friends.

First up is a man who cares an awful lot about the regular season, loves the supporter

shield, and thinks we all should too. It's Joe Lowry. Hi, Joe. I do. I'm printing really

long business cards with all of that directly on the front and then just my name and number on

the back. That's how I'm introducing myself to everyone now at this point.

I hope you're including the stumble that I included there in that business card as well. Yeah, it's just a little glitch in maybe an extra space or an extra little comma. It's in there, Taylor. Don't worry. It's the details, Joe. It's the details I appreciate. Rounding out our crew is a man who loves him some playoffs. I think it's Graham Ruthven. Hi Graham.

Hi, Taylor. Yeah, this is when the season gets serious for me. You know the meme of the guy sitting back playing FIFA on the PlayStation or the Xbox or whatever it is, and then he leans forward when things are for real. That's me when the MLS playoffs come around. And you know how that the MLS Cup is as a bigger trophy

than Supporters Shield? Oh boy. The MLS Cup has never been handed over when it's actually just a

repurposed Captain America Shield like I think the Philadelphia Union did two years ago.

That's how you know. We had a question about that. I had completely forgotten that one. I cannot remember why that happened. Maybe we'll have to do an entire episode about it. Unless, Joe, do you remember why they had a Captain America Shield? I just think that, and we sort of talked about this last week when I mentioned that LAFC won the shield, but didn't actually get to lift it because it wasn't there. I think it was a similar situation for the union where they'd won, they'd clinched it, but MLS wasn't, you know, waiting on standby to hand it off to them. They were going to have to wait till the next weekend or whatever it was. And so they improvised. That's my recollection, but I'll have to go back and read more about that because that was a great moment, Graham that this is a league with a two billion dollar

broadcast deal have multiple trophies for goodness sake graham you've seen the kits right like

i don't think you should be surprised by some of the way they uh they tighten up that budget

but i think what we're alluding to here uh what we're referencing is obviously the playoffs starting

graham being being team playoffs.

But last week on the list of questions episode, we had a little bit of a debate.

We were asked about which thing we consider more prestigious, the World Cup of the

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