Hello,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

And with me today is a friend of the show with the journalistic bona fides of an established news agency, but not the name of one.

It's Jeff Ruder.

Hello, Jeff.

Hi.

Yeah, I had to add the phonetic name to my Twitter bio. Did you really? It was about half a year ago because folks like you kept saying Reuter. I mean, that's not right. I mean, I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't think there's any audio evidence that exists of me saying your name wrong a whole bunch of times with they're all correcting me every time. Yes, it's Jeff Ruder. We know that now. We also know that Jeff is a wonderful reporter and a wonderful person, but I'm excited to talk to you because we, at least I have not talked much MLS on the show, certainly not much NWSL or USL. We're going to talk all of those things. Mostly I'm going to ask questions. Jeff's going to talk about them. But I want to start with the obvious place, which is Nickelodeon. How do you not? The NFL showed a game on there or some games on there. They made it sort of child friendly. They had some different elements that I thought were pretty solid. I know you did as well. And I know that you now have an article about this very topic. Yes, we do. Brooks Peck, Pablo Mauer and myself designed the first MLS broadcast on Nickelodeon.

We used the beloved Columbus crew and the beloved New England Revolution for this game. And we went through an entire game of how this should work. I think that the NFL did their best with their meager resources.

However, a league with so much clout as Major League Soccer really can branch out and get more creative with it.

So we created Nickelodeon allocation money, NAM, if you will.

We have Clarissa explaining it all, including a lovely Photoshop Pablo made

of Clarissa explaining targeted allocation money. We have sliming in three different moments of games.

We have the VAR official looking like the SpongeBob, eyes bulging out, hunched over meme as

he's looking at the VAR monitor. It's a mess. It's a

beautiful mess. And it felt like the right piece to drop as, uh, we are waiting a possible

second impeachment of the same president, uh, within the span of a year. So perfect time for it.

Everyone, everyone will take this with some great severity,

this piece, and no regrets. I got to say that that, like, triple threat that you listed there

is really the perfect one for writing an article like this of yourself, Brooks, and Pablo.

That made me very excited. The topic itself made me very excited. Everything you've just described

does not tamper that expectation. You're right that maybe you're going to get some serious responses of, you know, this wouldn't really work and this isn't feasible. And I don't understand if Don Garber would like this or not. That does feel we'll get some responses asking why we had this ended a tie. And I'm sure that we're going to have some fans of say the crew saying we beat them like

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