with Mando, Hannah and Elisa
“My name is Mando and I’m a Blogger…”
Yeah, I know this stuff sometimes sounds like an AA confessional, but relax I’m not trying to be pretentious, I really do talk this way.
I began this cycle writing about American sports and the absurdity of it all, I opened a Blogger.com account and made predictions, wrote about my collective Los Angeles sports obsessions and covered the 2000 election. I lost faith and a bit of passion for all of it. Call it self imposed ex-pat syndrome, or a general lack of trust, but I’ve come out the other side relaxed and refreshed but maniacally focused on soccer of all sports.
So I deleted my L.A. Dodgers blog, and my general interest political blog and started up a new one about football, Arsenal FC as a general focus, but one where I could talk about Italy or La Liga if I wanted to. Granted, I never knew anything about blogrolls or ways to advertise and link with other related sites, but in the 3 years I wrote about futbol there I got one unsolicited non spam response.
Great, so looked at a different way to connect with people and tried message boards, by this time I had already bought my first iPod and discovered the joys of podcasting, listening I might add, the thought of putting one together seemed too remote to even bother, so I sought out message boards for some like minded people who enjoyed the beautiful game and my favorite podcast: The Treble. Wasn’t for me.
Instead, I found myspace and stumbled onto my friends Hannah and Elisa there. Both were frequent callers to the Treble as well, and far more coherent usually than I was. I know the idea is kind of weird, “How much of a friend can you be if the initial connection was electronic?” Still, we all started hanging out there, and then we actually met a few months later at a pub in Pasadena, California during a Manchester United match last year in April. United lost.
Despite the “tragedy”, the idea for Forza Futbol began. Hannah had this idea to do a podcast and she thought about us; since her “non-myspace” friends weren’t sufficiently committed enough I guess. Elisa immediately said, “We should just talk about Real Madrid.” Thankfully we talked her down from the ledge, but we came up with a great idea. We wanted to talk about Spain and Italy, two leagues that are still consistently and shamelessly underreported here in the States, and we wanted to make some friends along the way.
We did. We were privileged in covering last years’ exciting final in La Liga. We interviewed all of our heroes and realized they were just great people who loved the game just like us. We got better at doing this podcast thing.
All that we have been doing for the last 8 months has gotten us to this point. Despite some detours along the way, Hannah, Elisa and I are back here at Forza Futbol. I’d like to announce too, that starting in January we are going to be part of Champions Soccer Radio network. The place where I might add we all met originally I might add.
Nice, huh? Thanks for listening.
