Welcome to the Total Soccercer show and a show where we're judging some of Europe's biggest teams based on what we've seen of them thus far.

We're thinking of this as hot takes, but with data and evidence, it's all very empirical over here.

My name's Ryan Bailey.

Joining me today, your friend of mine, Taylor Rockwell. Hello, Taylor.

Hello, I'm excited to admit how wrong I was in my previews and man was I wrong.

I mean, previews are a fool's errand anyway, right? Taylor, we know that from the outset.

Yes, that's what we say when we spend hours and hours of time researching and then recording

them.

This is a fool's errand and I'm excited to admit it.

Yes, indeed.

Graham Ratham's here.

Hello, Ryan.

How are you?

You're still super excited for your favorite international break of the year?

You were telling me earlier that you wish the Nations League was even more disruptive to the club season, right?

I wish we just had a Nation's season and we just did this the whole year instead of domestic soccer actually, yeah. Yeah, that would be my... Well, Taylor and I talked about that on this week's 101 as we're kind of headed with it at national soccer. So you'll love that, Ryan. September break is always good. And it's always good to speak to Joseph Lowry, who's here right now. Hello, Joe. It's me. I'm here. I thought this was an evidence in data-free episode. I just went pure on vibes because I usually have the evidence in the data thing. I wanted a show off. Was that what I was supposed to do? Someone wants a job at Fox. Wow. We're doing points today. one point for gram funny there we get there we're good I suppose the data in evidence Joe is the fact that we've had three rounds of European matches so far as as far as the data goes is that fair to say no that's I just actually went back and wiped my memory to erase any any visuals that I had of these games. I'm going purely off of vibes. No, these are, you mentioned previews being a fool's errand. This is almost as much of a fool's errand as other things. Oh, this is more. No, this is more of a phil's errand. Okay. Graham might be right. But counterpoint to that and similar reasoning to why Graham just got an actual point, fun and funny, because it's fun to go through and look and over index on things early in the season.

And there are things that we can learn along the way. So it is not totally evidence-free.

But we are throwing darts towards the wall where the dartboard we think probably is.

That's right. We're drawing some way to early conclusions here, essentially, Joe, is what the object of this one is, which we'll get to right after I tell you about patreon.com slash total soccer show is the best way to support Total Soccer show. There is bonus content there, including bonus episodes, videos and access to our Discord server, Patreon.com slash Total Soccer Show, please, and thank you.

Okay, guys, so we haven't actually told each other what our takes are going to be for this

episode.

I'm going to tear up.

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