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

FC podcast. Hello, Ranks Squad. Hello, Ranks Squad and welcome to Ranks, FCS.

It's your favourite intercontinental transatlantic football podcast.

My name is Shaq Collins, and I will be your host today.

And joining me across the water all the way from San Diego.

It's the one and only Mr. Dean Jones.

How you doing, me?

Hello, mate.

Yeah, not bad at all.

Probably better than any Real Madrid fans out there anyway.

But yeah, we are in that weird stage, really, in podcast season, where all the club business is kind of sorted now.

Like, there's obviously a couple of things that need addressing.

But we know most of what's going to play out in the next couple of weeks.

And we're also starting to get into World Cup mode.

So, yeah, we've decided that given we've done so many particularly like Champions League

takeaways recently,

that we should probably do a little drop on World Cup and where we start to see this heading,

what the early signs are for how this World Cup pans out.

So today we're going to have a little bit of a mix.

We'll start off with some domestics just in things we love.

But then the majority of this podcast is going to get stuck into the World Cup and what we should expect from the teams that we either root for.

We either are going to be watching through, I mean, you obviously don't want England to win, but you're going to have to watch all the England games, all those teams that we actually are expecting to try to go all the way. The favourites, shall we say, as well as the kind of home nations. So we'll have a little look at what's going down. It's going to be very exciting. I'm going to do Roots to the World Cup final today. but before we get stuck into that, Dean, I think we should probably talk about Real Madrid. Things we love, not necessarily things we love here, but things that are stealing the headlines. I think it's probably a more appropriate title of this. Obviously, we talked about the classical Barcelona winning the league. What next Real Madrid, on our Patreon episode on Monday, the Postbox.

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