Hey there, welcome to Football with Grant Wall, thanks so much for joining me.

Our interview guest in today's episode is Marissa Pilla, who's been terrific on TV covering

the NWSL, the U.S. Women's National Team and the Philadelphia Union.

Before we get going, you can sign up for a free or paid subscription to my newsletter

at GrantWall.com. It has all my writing, including 14 magazine-style stories in our first four

months and lots of free posts as well. That's GrantWall.com. The best way to support my work is

by taking out a paid subscription. In segment one, Chris Whittingham and I will break down

the news in the soccer world. We'll have Marissa Pilla in segment two, but let's bring in

Whitty. How are you, my man?

Doing alright, Grant. I was bemoaning the FA Cup weekend on Thursday's pod, and then

I swear to you, I must have watched a portion of at least 16 matches, so I am a giant fraud.

That's impressive. I did not, but you're capable of doing that because of the screen being

divided into four on ESPN Plus, correct? Yes, yes. On the Apple TV, ESPN app, you can

quad-box and put four games on at the same time. If there's a time to do that, honestly,

for me, most of the football weekend took place on ESPN Plus. When you look at Barcelona,

drop points again, you had all the FA Cup games. You had Ricardo Pepe's debut, what you

get to with Augsburg. There was a really good Dortmund game against, who was it, Munch and

Gladbach? Yes, they came back. That was a really good game. There was a lot of good stuff

on ESPN Plus, so I just kind of had that quad box on the entire day on Saturday. It was

actually pretty fun. The FA Cup action for me was pretty fun. I watched most of it.

That's good. We'll get into more detail on FA Cup later on here, but let's start with

Ricardo Pepe. You mentioned it, made his debut with Augsburg in a three-to-one loss to

...