The Dutch Style Of Pickup Soccer And A Dog Named Jeff, With Leander Schaerlaeckens

It's not the sort of anxiety that haunts you, or maybe it just rates below too many of my other haunting anxieties to register. But as a non-soccer person, the quadrennial arrival of the World Cup has a peculiar and not altogether unpleasant anxiety about it; a bunch of stuff is about to happen that I do not really know anything about, and I am going to put myself happily in that wave's way and not know what hit me. I'm fine with that, for the most part, and this year's 48-team World Cup field is sufficiently vast and varied that I couldn't learn everything about it if I wanted to, our own stellar collection of team previews notwithstanding. For the true soccer dunce, the key is to learn enough to enjoy yourself, but not so much that you get stressed out. It was with that in mind that Drew and I welcomed Leander Schaerlaeckens, Guardian columnist and author of the excellent new book The Long Game: U.S. Men's Soccer And Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey To The Top, Or Thereabouts, to this week's episode.

I am biased, of course, but I'd call this episode a success on those terms. After the usual goofery—remembering some salient scenes from The Insider, me singing in a Scott Stapp voice, Drew chastising me for referring to Long Island Cryptkeeper Bill O'Reilly a "friend of the pod"—we turned to soccer around the six-minute mark and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the hour. Even and maybe especially as a confirmed soccer dunce—one of two on the pod, as Drew cheerfully allowed—the result was pretty fascinating stuff. Leander knows a lot and explains it patiently, and he answered our questions on the possible positive and negative effects of this year's new and much bigger field, where national soccer styles come from (and whether that question can be answered without doing major cultural essentialism maneuvers), and where the USMNT as a team fits into the current firmament of international soccer both in terms of quality and style.