Hello,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and I'm very, very excited for today's episode. I'm always excited to record an episode of The Total Soccer show, but especially so when we get to welcome an old pal back to the show. It's Paul Tenoreo. Paul, it is lovely to see you, lovely to talk to you. It's been a while, man. You've been busy.

It has been a while. Yeah, I have been busy. But I love being on this show. You guys, you guys launched allocation disorder. We owe you forever for letting Sam and I, you know, do our crazy thing on Fridays.

That's very kind of you. I loved that show. I missed that show. Our MLS coverage will,

I'll just say this openly, never be as in the weeds or as like detail specific as you two

could get. Because you all know, knew so much of that league and the particulars and the

intricacies and had so many different sources

informing on different things that you could really get into like the meat of an issue and the

subtext of an issue and you all were excellent at parsing that. So I missed that program. And I love

Sam, but I love you more because you're here now. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, man. Yeah, I miss,

I miss doing it too. But thank you for that. But you've been, instead of podcasting, you've been bookwriting, my friend, The Messy Effect, How the Global Legend changed the future of American Soccer is the title and subtitle. You said before we started recording, this is the hardest thing you've ever done. And you've played some soccer games before. I'm going to assume you've run some 5Ks and some 10Ks, but this, this was the hardest thing?

Definitely. I mean, you know, I went into it knowing it would be hard. Like, I don't think I was

blind to the idea that writing a book is difficult. But yeah, I mean, it pushed me to the limit

basically everywhere you could, like physically, it pushed me to the limit basically everywhere you could like physically,

mentally, the reporting side of it to report something that's evolving in real time where

some of these enormous business decisions are being made at a board level. I'm trying to report

on those and they don't know what's going to happen. So to get people to talk to you and they don't know what's going to happen.

So to get people to talk to you and they don't know who's going to kind of win and what's going to come out of these meetings, that part of it was super difficult, sitting down and writing it, balancing writing the book while working for the athletic full time and being a dad and a husband, a two, you know, a four year old and a a six year old like that part of it was very difficult so yeah it was it was extremely um challenging but you

know i i was joking with something the other day it's like every time you hear like a coach say like

you'll have to get out of your comfort zone you know like i was i was the last two years living

way outside my comfort zone, you know, like I was, I was the last two years living way outside my

comfort zone. What was the least comfortable moment for you then with that in mind? I'm assuming

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