Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the Total Soccer Show.

My name is Ryan Bailey, and I'm pleased to say today's show features a titan of US soccer journalism,

someone whose work you will have read and laughed along with for well over a decade

and a truly celebrated member of the community.

But that's enough about me.

It's time to welcome my guest today. It's Brooks Peck. Brooks, how you doing? I'm pretty good. I mean, none of that applies to me. So, yeah, congratulations, Ryan, on all your success. Thank you very much. It wasn't about you at all. I was just fluffing myself up there. But it's lovely to speak to you again. By the way, before we get into it, I should mention Taylor Rockwell, who is not around on the show today, is now a father. Congratulations to him. Hey, congrats, Taylor. I think, yeah, exactly. Congrats. And I think when he's recovered and he's had enough sleep, he'll be back on the show. So seven or eight years, I'll give it, something like that. Maybe 18 or 19, yeah. We'll see about that. Anyway, congratulations to Taylor. Brooks, it's been a minute. How have you been? I'm pretty good. You know, Ryan, we used to have these kinds of chats a lot more frequently than we have recently, so it's nice to be here. Yeah, we'll get into it. For those who don't know,

Brooks Peck currently works at The Athletic. We can get into your role a little bit more later on,

but maybe made your name in US soccer with Dirty Tackle, the blog that was on Yahoo and was

independent before that. We can get into that story as well. That's kind of where we first met,

wasn't it, Brooks? I was doing a

more popular and better and funnier blog. I think of that 2007, 2008. That was called the spoiler,

and you were doing dirty tackle at the time. And we kind of just, we kind of cross paths then,

I think. We did. Actually, I think I sent you an email or other way around and we just started talking over email.

And then in the fall of 2009, I was in London and we met up.

And we had a little gathering and then it all took off from there.

It did indeed.

It did indeed.

Things went and I ended up coming to Dirty Tackle and work with Yahoo and Dirty Tackle for many years. That was a lot of fun. And then we'd had something called the Dirty Tackle podcast we did for a while. And this is kind of a reunion of sorts, isn't it, Brooks? Well, I call it a two-thirds reunion because we did have a third member of that podcast, character called Theo Messi. Do you remember him? Vaguely, I tried to forget him. He was a very shameful part of the Dirty Tackle history, but, yeah, he did exist for a while. People did seem to like him for some reason, but obviously he's not here today, but we're going to crack on anyway, Brooks. We've got a lot of fun stuff planned for this show. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

What was that? Did you hear something? Is there someone else in the line? What is shameful about wild success? Is that Theo? Theo? Is that you? It's me. It's good to be here. Wow, he lives.

Oh, my goodness. Look who's joining us.

Special guest Theo Messy, back from the...

Band is back together.

...