Hello, this is international football commentator Derek Ray, and you're listening to the Ranks FC podcast.

Hello, welcome to Ranks FC, and that is another year in the books for us.

Thank you all so much for your loyal support on this podcast across the entire year,

whether you just listen here, whether you also listen on Patreon,

whether you're new to the podcast, whether you've been listening since the BR days.

Thank you to every single one of you that tunes in.

We hope you've all had a great 2025 and are looking forward to 2026. Jack is away traveling. It's honeymoon time for him. So today you've got me.

But thankfully, I'm joined by you, the rank squad for a special hot takes episode to carry us into 2026 and come up with some bold predictions, some bold statements on what we've seen in 2025 and what we might get out of 2026. Thank you to everybody that's contributed to these

over on the Patreon. I asked the other day for some ideas for this. People didn't really

realize at the time that it was going on

the main episodes, but that's what it's become today as I do a solo show here on Ranks FC. These are

few and far between. You don't usually just get me on the mic, but hopefully you bear with me over the

next hour because we've got some fun stuff coming up across the course of this show and some really bold takes from you guys.

So this is going to be a fun one.

Before we get stuck into the main segment with all of the hot takes in it,

and yeah, as I say, they promise you there are some really good ones for you to look forward to

that will have you chuckling along.

Or perhaps making you a bit angry, I don't know. It depends who you support. I just wanted to quickly address what we probably would have done if Jack was around today, which would have been

to have a look at some of the best things about 2025. And in particular, I think we would have done

an award show of some sort

we talked about doing a show and probably leading it on our best player of 2025 or maybe

our favourite player of 2025 and if we'd have had that discussion I think we'd have talked

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