Welcome to the Planet Football Podcast. I'm Grant Wall and our topic today is Russia in World Cup 2018.

Our guest is James Apeel.

James is a graduate in sports management

from Columbia University and a freelance writer

who lived in Moscow until last fall

having covered Russian sports for more than a decade. Thanks for joining me

James. Thanks for having me grum. Really cool to have you here excited to talk about this topic. G there's lots to talk about. First off, I just wanted to kind of have you

explain to our listeners here your background with Russia.

Sure.

I actually studied Russian history as an undergraduate student over in the UK and emerging

from the academic sphere and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I decided do what you love and what I loved was writing about soccer.

And as you can probably imagine in the US, never mind in the UK, it's a pretty busy marketplace

for people who want to write.

And somebody told me, well, you need to find your niche, you know, you need to find your space in

this particular environment where you can write authoritatively better than anyone else.

And Russia, it was.

I've been watching Russian soccer as a kind of

masochistic interest for for a few years in the late 90s early 2000s and I guess turned that into a professional enterprise and I guess you know it's one of those subjects that periodically raises interest outside of Russia and Eastern Europe.

And Russia, 2018, obviously one of those subjects prior to this you know people have

Periodically come to me and asked me for the low down on what's going on over there and so I just carry on with it

and keep my finger on the pulse of what's happening over there.

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