Hello, everybody and welcome to the Total Soccer show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and I'm excited to be here with you today to discuss some major league soccer.

Here with me to do so is the champion of your conca calf hearts.

It's Mr. Joe Lowry.

Hello, Joe.

See, see, see, see see every everybody now no

okay that's all right taylor i'm stoked to be here these are some of my favorite shows of the year because

there's so much going on we were talking before we started recording there are multiple big ticket

like segment one worthy topics we're not even probably going to talk about at all today.

There's a, the doc is deep. Let's just put it that way. The dock is deep and that excites me a lot. Joe, I'm happy that you are excited. I'm happy you got your, your big time billing. I'm struggling to come up with big time billing for our other co-host on the day. So I'm going to say Josh sergeant's new best friend, it's Jeff Ruter. Hello, Jeff. Yes, of course. I think that whenever

anyone who's from the broader Midwest comes back to Major League Soccer and is Missouri part of it, listen, if we're distracting you by having the conversation of Missouri status in the Midwest, that's enough time for me and Josh to like, you know, kind of find our common ground and get him acclimated. So I've already won. I'll tell you this. You keep talking. Josh Sargent, Wikipedia tells me, it's from O'Fallon, Missouri. And when you hover over O'Fallon, Missouri, you got a picture of a log cabin. I'm saying that's Midwest. And I have a deer friend named Fallon. So like, look at that. It's like we're already finding her common ground. Like a real deer or like a, no, she's an adult human. And thanks for clarifying. Like I do have dear friends, but she is not one of them. She's human, you know, who is a friend who is dear. Yeah. Got it. Thank you. Moving away from the dear topic for a moment.

Joe, you hinted out there in your introduction.

I was listening to an NFL fantasy podcast because nerd.

And they were discussing how like this time of year is kind of their favorite because like the season is over from a fantasy perspective.

Now you can just think about what comes next and what if and all of the possibilities it's all there to play for. Jeff, is this like sort of the most enjoyable time of the year to cover Major League Soccer when it's all just rumors and transfers and the like? I think so because there's so much real estate to sort of see what you want to see in the plans, right? And you can you can look and say Josh Sargent and Georgie Mahalovich are teaming up in Toronto. Okay, what does that mean? Is it going to compare to the bygone? You can focus on like past areas of Toronto. You can look at past like two Americans trying to leave these clubs sort of issues, which is to say past iterations of Toronto. But you can also, I don't know, you can look at other teams like Houston,

bringing back Hector Herrera, and you know, you have any number of reactions to that

and feelings about the wisdom of that move, what that says about other things.

There are so much, and frankly, so little evidence to prove you wrong,

that I think that you can really start

to build up ahead of steam for some very ludicrous preseason predictions, which is really what

the lifeblood of Major League Soccer and coaches talks once the season gets going. So this is where

the magic happens, guys. This is where we're all figuring out that the white caps will finish 15th in

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