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Evan Ream, Communications Manager for NorCal Premier Soccer, comes on to discuss his excellent and colorful debut book, ⁠Not When, But If?⁠, which focuses on the rise of Sacramento Republic FC and how the capital city’s professional soccer franchise became an MLS expansion favorite in short order, only for its bid to indefinitely stall.

Here are some highlights –

4:21-5:27: “Later that year, when it started to become not only a really successful season but [also] sort of a special season that resonated around the area of Sacramento, I decided that I was interested in writing a book. And if you had asked me then, let’s say in September of 2014, where this was gonna go, I thought that Sacramento would probably be in MLS in the next couple of years; that didn’t end up happening. Therefore, the final product ended up being nothing like what I thought it would be. And I kept postponing and postponing ‘cuz I never really had an ending. … It was almost 10 years later, I finally decided, ‘You know what? I’ve been sitting on all this work for such a long time, and I think these people really deserve to have their stories told,’ so I set my own arbitrary ending, which is just the end of the first season, and documented that.”

8:35-9:17: “Nobody really knows what Sacramento is, especially from a national standpoint. The chapter of branding the team there, ‘Well, we need to brand the team, but first we need to brand Sacramento.’ Because what does Sacramento stand for or what do people know about Sacramento other than it’s 90 minutes from San Francisco and 90 minutes from Lake Tahoe? I honestly didn’t know too much about Sacramento when I first started covering the team. Even though I lived in Davis 10 miles away, I had never really went to Sacramento for the most part. And so I had to figure out what Sacramento was.”   

20:37-21:17: “They did the simplest thing ever and the smartest thing ever and something that too many, doesn’t matter what professional sport or who’s playing or whatnot, people just don’t do. All they did was just listen. They just listened to the fans. And when the fans are like, ‘Hey, we want this, this and this,’ they were like, ‘OK, we can do that.’ Whereas in a lot of American professional sports…it’s like, ‘No, no, no. We need to overproduce this. No, no, we’re smart, we’re the owners, so we know what we’re doing, so we’re gonna tell them what to do,’ when in fact you’re completely out of touch with reality.”

45:50-46:02: “The sport has grown a ton; it’s just that the gatekeepers in the media world don’t understand that and have refused to accept it for the most part, however it is getting better.”

If you like what you’ve heard, be sure to check out Not When, But If?.

OTNB’s previous book special, which featured Brad Balukjian, can be found here.

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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.