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Thank you. Hello, hello everybody and welcome to The Total Soccer Show.

My name is Taylor Rockwell.

Welcome to this Americans in Action slash U.S.

Soccer Listener Questions episode.

Joining me today, the GM of the Total Soccer Show, which means I'm not entirely sure what he does.

It's Joe Lavery.

Hi, Joe.

Taylor, that's well done on your part. I was waiting to see what my role was going to be for this episode. You know, it's a good role. It's a good job. You sit back in a cushy chair in Chicago or now maybe Atlanta or North Carolina. It seems like U.S. soccer is going to work on building something on the East Coast headquarter-wise now that they don't live in soccer house anymore. But I sit around in a chair. Occasionally, I like Skype Weston McKenney and talk about Harry Potter. I might Skype Allegory and get yelled out in Italian for a while or now Chris Armis for some reason at Leeds United. I don't do a lot. I don't do a lot, but I make several thousand dollars, several hundred thousand dollars, excuse me. I wish it was several thousand. That'd be even better. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and you get free tickets to games, and you have to talk to Giorana's mom. That's the downside, I guess, if you're the GM of U.S. soccer. We have questions about the GMs, about future U.S. head coaches, roster choices when it

comes to the U.S. women's national team.

Plenty of questions to get to.

So, Joe, let's get into it with the first one from Shreyes Ramani.

The biggest news from the Kanka Kaff Commable announcement last week was the 2024

Copa America will be in the

United States, but they also announced a combined 24 women's gold cup. We've been wanting the

women to get more competitive games against quality opponents. Will this help, Joe?

I think it will help, but I do not think it gets you all the way there. If we think about this as a spectrum, right? The U.S. right now is on maybe the left side of that spectrum where all the quality games are over on the right side. They're maybe not fully on the left, but they're pretty far in that direction. They don't get to play European teams. They don't play the best to the best from South America. Most often they end up playing

teams from Concaf in their regional tournaments. That's how this game goes. This inches them a little

...