Jurgen Klopp to Leave Liverpool

This morning I woke up and scanned my RSS feeds as I normally do. I didn’t anticipate watching a 30 minute video while getting my kids ready for school, but the news that Jurgen Klopp is stepping down at the end of the season became my focus. I wrote about my love for Liverpool in 2020, but it’s worth restating how much Klopp means to the city and the club. He completely transformed a massive club that had been underachieving for decades. His man-management, technical ability and leadership are all superpowers that make Liverpool one of the toughest clubs to play against and one that nearly anyone would want to play for.

Soccer has quickly become of those most important, least important things in my life, and I credit Klopp for a lot of that. Not sure any manager can step in and do what he did for the club, but I’m grateful that I got to experience it over the past decade. I just hope they can write the perfect ending to this story over the next few months. They’re currently first in the Premier League, in the Carabao Cup Final and still alive in both the Europa League and FA Cup. What an amazing opportunity.

Because I can’t write so good, I’ll leave you with these words from the great Roger Bennett:

Liverpool – Champions of England

The story of my soccer fandom in general and in particular that of Liverpool FC isn’t particularly novel. Like a lot of Americans, I started watching the Premier League when NBC acquired the rights to stream games back in 2013, and I actively committed to staying neutral – just watching the big games and trying […]

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Spotify is buying Bill Simmons’s The Ringer

Peter Kafka, for Recode

Spotify is making yet another big budget purchase aimed at getting a lead in the growing podcast industry: The streaming music company has agreed to a deal to purchase The Ringer, the podcast-centric media company run and owned by Bill Simmons.

Good for Simmons and The Ringer. I do worry about where we’re heading with targeted ads, walled content gardens, and podcast fragmentation though. For now, they appear to intend to follow the Gimlet acquisition model of making content available freely to all. You wonder for how long, however.

Also, I hope some of the great writing continues, as the Ringer and The Athletic are two of the best sports sites out there right now.

Cutting the cord

At the end of last year, my wife and I decided to cancel our U-verse service and move to Xfinity internet only. We had talked about this for a while but ultimately decided that the cost (and overall lack of interest in watching TV most of the time) meant that we were throwing a decent […]

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