Hello, hello, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show.

It was a long one.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and it's Tuesday, which means it's time to do some MLS updating Miami,

potentially adding their seventh, eighth, designated player of the season, Toronto turning

off the lights at their stadium and telling their two Italian, quote-unquotequote stars that no one is home, NYCFC getting a new designated player

and a giant pigeon statue, and much, much more. Here with me to break it all down, I've got Jeff

Ruder back again after having seemingly avoided any verbal tirades from Jesse Marsh after last

week's very mild criticism. Hello, Jeff. Hi. And so far,

yes. But I think we should start with the most important things, the pigeon statue. This is good.

We need more like mascot statues. Minnesota United has like a large loon statue. Every team.

That should be the new thing. We're past the soccer specific stadium phase. We We're past the unwield pay-to-play phase. Now we're in the let's build giant statues of animals phase of the league. MLS 4.0. Are we past the pay-to-play phase? I missed that. Not fully. Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry. DC. Hey, leading away in mediocrity. Yeah, the headline for this one from Chris Campbell got more and more absurd.

NYCFC will be floating a 700-pound, five-story tall inflatable pigeon down the Hudson River

tomorrow.

It will finally end up in Willett's Point, where rumor has it, that it will transform

into the concrete sculpture that will adore an Etihad Park.

Jeff, they're transforming an inflatable pigeon into a concrete statue. There's some David Copperfield, David Blaine stuff happening here, I think. Yeah, also, Hollywood's just out of clever ideas, and we're just bringing back transformers again, but this time as like, MLS statues. Like, come on, get a new slant, guys. Let's go. Beautiful. a man who spent a chunk, a man who spent a chunk of last week attempting to chisel Pomadu Kha's likeness onto the side of Mount Rushmore, it's Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe. Wow, I didn't expect Pah's name to be evoked in minute three of this podcast. That's great work on your part, Taylor. Yeah, I did just get a text. MLS is going to be introducing mascot allocation money, so it's going to be ma'am or giant statue

allocation money, so it's going to be MAM or

giant statue allocation money, GASAM. So any of those things are on the table. They have not landed

on the final naming convention yet, but there'll be another AM to help MLS move into this new phase.

DC United is going to use that money to build a very teeny tiny little eagle that they will then say cost several million dollars and right you know everyone will celebrate accordingly. Jeff, have you been to Matt Rushmore before? Joe, excuse me. Have you been to Matt Rushmore? I have. Also, yes. Look at that. Look at us. Wow. How grand are we talking here? What's happening right now? Or is it like small and far away. You were in the Dakota. It's your fault?

What's interesting is that like you have to get like the close any sort of proximity to it, you do have to like show the National Park Pass or you have to get into whatever. But you do as you're driving up to it, walking up to it, you can see it. Like they're not trying to hide the thing. There's no like curtains or barriers to be like, ah, you must get through. So you can see it. And it still is

very impressive. Like, especially like considering how they made it and you learn about plum-bobbs

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