👋 Welcome…

...to The Tap-Inn. Where you can tap in to the world of soccer with me, your first-gen Irish bartender, Joe.

Seven days until the Premier League is back. Let's get you ready.

On tap today:

One more thing before we pour: we're shaking up the format next week. Same soccer, same bar, just a fresh pour. Stay tuned.

Ready? I thought so. Let's pour.

I was once asked if I’d rather own an NFL, NBA or soccer team. All the same th ing you might think. Wrong. It is not the same thing. It's not even close.

Buying an American franchise is like buying into a chain restaurant. Head office guarantees you a spot on the map. You have a wage cap which helps manage your expenses plus you can even move cities. Buying a soccer club is like buying a pub on a street where the three worst pubs get shut down every May.

1. Finishing last is a punishment, not a prize. Come bottom of the NBA and you go into a lottery for the number one draft pick. Come bottom of the Premier League and you're relegated, and most of your revenue goes down with you. No American sports owner has ever woken up to find their team demoted a division.

2. No cap, no draft, no safety net. The NFL and NBA spread talent around on purpose, with caps and drafts and lotteries. Soccer does the opposite. If you're rich enough you simply buy the best players. If you're not, you sell yours to whoever is.

3. The vetting is a different sport. The NFL insists one person holds at least 30% of a team, caps outside investment funds at 10%, bars countries from investing directly, and makes any sale clear three-quarters of the other owners. The NBA is looser and still stops well short of handing over control. In soccer? Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund owns 80% of Newcastle. Abu Dhabi has run Manchester City since 2008.

4. Fans can own the whole thing. Green Bay is America's lovely exception, roughly 539,000 shareholders, who are all fans, own the club. It was grandfathered into the NFL because they would never approve it today. The NBA has never had a team like that at all. In Germany, league rules say club members have to hold a voting majority, and Bayern Munich has over 300,000 of them. In Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona are still owned by their members, who vote for the president. Over there it's the rule, not the exception.

None of this has stopped American money piling in, mind you. In 2005 there wasn't a single American owner in the Premier League. Malcolm Glazer bought Manchester United that year for £790 million, and by last season roughly half the league was majority American-owned.

Fenway Sports Group confirmed the sale of roughly 30% of Liverpool to a consortium fronted by the investor Amit Bhatia and including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

The group calls itself 1892 Holdings, after the year the club was founded. The stake reportedly values Liverpool at just over $7 billion, a record for an investment in a soccer club. FSG paid about £300 million for the club in 2010. You can do that math yourself.

Fenway keeps majority ownership and day-to-day control. Bhatia becomes vice chairman. Bezos, for all the headlines, doesn't even take a seat on the board. But here's the part worth circling. The deal reportedly carries an option for the new group to buy a controlling stake inside twelve months, at a valuation nearer $8 billion. Liverpool could have completely different owners by next summer.

The British Government has started paying attention though. There's now an Independent Football Regulator, and from the 2027/28 season every club in the top five tiers will need a license from it to play at all.

So if you're picking a team ahead of next week, take thirty seconds to look up who's holding the keys. It'll tell you more about the next five years than the squad list will.

And if you want a own a stake of the action, it’s time to break out the piggy bank…

Aston Villa lost the UEFA Super Cup on Wednesday night in Salzburg, beaten 2-1 by Paris Saint-Germain. But the headline wasn’t the score. It was their new striker Brian Madjo.

Madjo is 17. He's 6ft 4in. Born in Enfield, north London but raised in Luxembourg. He was brought through at Metz in France, and signed by Villa in January on his 17th birthday for a reported €12 million.

Then he wasn't allowed to play. FIFA classed the move as an international transfer, because he'd played three times for Luxembourg's senior side, and those types of transfers can't be registered until a player turns 18. Villa argued he was English. It took a hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in July and a verdict this month to free him up. Seven months of waiting.

Just before half-time, John McGinn swung one in and Madjo volleyed it in. At 17 years and 212 days he's now the youngest scorer in Super Cup history, taking a record Patrick Kluivert had held since 1996. He had six shots on the night, more than anyone else on the field.

England supporters are already calling him the next Harry Kane, which is a big weight to hang on a lad who can't legally rent a car. It’s only one game but we may have just seen England’s new big star.

Before the Premier League starts each year, England plays one a one off cup game to kick off the new season. Last season's league champions — Arsenal — face off against last season’s FA Cup winners — Man City. Note: if the same team won both the league and cup, the team who finished second in the league would play the FA Cup runners-up.

It’s happening this Sunday, 3pm in Cardiff, 10am Eastern.

What it actually is. The season's curtain-raiser, first played in 1908 and called the Charity Shield right up until 2002. Ticket and program money still gets carved up between the 124 clubs that entered the FA Cup, each one nominating a local cause. So it's a real trophy paying for real things but also a glorified friendly.

Why it's in Wales. Wembley is booked. The Weeknd has the place from August 14 to 19, so the Shield decamps to Cardiff's Principality Stadium, home of Welsh rugby, for the first time in twenty years. Arsenal know the ground well. They won it there in 2002 and 2004.

What to watch. Enzo Maresca's first competitive game since replacing Pep Guardiola. Arsenal begin their title defense against Coventry five days later.

Thanks to A Lynch who this week asked us - "What in the world is a false 9?”

A great question. Remember Big Tony on the door? Last week he was dragging queue-jumpers back by the collar. This week he's got a different problem.

Big Tony's job is to watch the fella standing right by the door, ready to slip through the second it opens. In soccer, that's your number 9. The center forward. Furthest player up the field, closest to goal, waiting to score. A false 9 is that same fella wandering off to the pool table.

He's still listed as the striker. He just doesn't stand where a striker stands. He drops back into midfield, twenty or thirty yards from goal, and asks Big Tony an impossible question. Follow him and the door's wide open for someone else to run through. Stay put and he's got acres of space to pick his pass. There's no right answer. That's the whole point.

Hungary did it to England at Wembley in 1953, when Nándor Hidegkuti kept drifting backwards and scored a hat-trick in a 6-3 win. England's defenders spent the afternoon marking a man who wasn't there. It was their first ever home defeat to a team from mainland Europe.

Pep Guardiola made it famous again in 2009, pulling Lionel Messi in from the wing for a Clásico at the Bernabéu. Barcelona won 6-2, and Real Madrid's center backs never did work out whose job he was.

Want the wider picture? Here's my full explainer on how formations shape a game.

Origin: The soccer video games, of all places. Championship Manager, first released from a bedroom in Shropshire in 1992 and later reborn as Football Manager, tagged its under-20 players with the highest possible ceiling as "wonderkids." A generation of fans grew up hunting for them on a laptop at 2am, and the word leaked out into real life.

Definition: A teenager who is obviously, undeniably special. Note the tense though. Wonderkid is a prediction, not an achievement. The games are full of them. So is the scrapheap.

Usage: "Villa have a proper wonderkid on their hands with this Madjo lad." "So did DC United with Freddy Adu. He was the next Pelé at 14 and ended up at thirteen clubs in eight countries. Ask me again in February."

August 14, 1977: 77,691 people turned up to a soccer league game in New Jersey.

The NY Cosmos hosted the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in an NASL playoff game at Giants Stadium. The place had sold out three days early, so the club talked the stadium authority into opening up standing room and shifted another 2,196 tickets at the gate.

For scale: the Yankees played two home games that same weekend and drew 75,968 across both. One soccer game outsold them.

The Cosmos won 8-3. That squad had Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia in it. All legends of the game. It was Pelé's last season, and he'd lift the trophy two weeks later. Forty-nine years on, the World Cup final was played next door at MetLife. Soccer was always big in America, it just took the scenic route.

When one of the world’s best players turned up at your pick-up game.

A few weeks back, a group of guys in New York were playing their pick-up game as usual. Public pitch, after work, nothing special. Then Michael Olise turned up and asked to join in.

If that name means nothing to you yet, Olise is 24 and he plays for Bayern Munich, and he had just finished a World Cup in which he set the record for the most assists at a single tournament with seven. The record he broke was Pelé's, set in 1970. It had stood for 56 years.

He played in his socks. No boots. Checkered pants, orange t-shirt. He took those poor men apart, then stayed behind afterwards and posed for photos with every single one of them.

Legend.