The Athletic FC

Hello and welcome to the TIFO football podcast.

I'm Joe Devine and today I'm delighted to be joined by John McKenzie.

I know that I don't have an exclamation mark after my name, but everyone else does.

Well, that's because I'm not exclaiming your name.

Steve doesn't say.

Steve doesn't either know, of course.

It's implied. The most regular people don't get exclamation marks. Kaya Kynak. Ola. Yeah, and also, Ola, oh, look at you. You said, Ola, why? Because it's a Spanish special. Because it's sort of a Spanish special. Although the third topic of the day is someone from a Spanish-speaking country. Is that fair to say? Yeah. He is from Uruguay and they speak Spanish there, right? Thank God for a second. I thought he was Brazilian. Never mind. He'd have understood if I said the word, Ola. Yeah, he would have understood either way. You were absolutely right. He's from an Ola country. That's it. And also, Thomas Hill Lopez Menchero. Thanks very much for having me on. Thanks for coming back. It's always a delight to see you. Likewise. Sorry, too long a pause. A little pregnant pause there before you said. We're just thinking. And he's got all four of his names with him, right?

That's true, man.

I'm glad every time.

Now, also Steve Hankies here.

See.

Yeah, he's written a valued colleague in the script, but I didn't read that aloud.

Now, here's what we talked about on today's show.

We spoke about Arbelloa at Rail Madrid, you know, and whether anything has changed with him as the new sort of permanent in, we don't know how long his contract is, we have a little conversation about that. But has he brought back the Ancelotti vibes to Real Madrid, they're top of the league at the moment. So we discussed that. After a break, we talk about curling. I forgot we did that. We talked about curling.

John brings up the hog line. Yeah? You like that bit, then you, John? Keep watching to find out what a

hog line is. Then there's some discussion of Barcelona. They've had a bit of a stumble this season.

So we discuss if the high line, fancy flick football they play, is starting to show too many weaknesses.

There's also an election happening at Barcelona.

So we stopped by to discover how boring that is and how it won't make any interesting difference to the football.

And then we don't linger on it for very long for that reason.

And then at the very end of the podcast, we talk about how

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