The English Premier League season got under way in August with 2019 champions Manchester City favorites to retain their crown. Liverpool ran them close last year but Pep Guardiola’s men were too good in the end. After five games, unsurprisingly, it’s a Liverpool-Manchester City one-two at the top of the table but a surprise defeat away at Norwich has left Guardiola’s troops five points behind Jurgen Klopp’s Merseysiders.

If anyone doubted Liverpool’s mental state after such a grueling season in 2018-2019, perhaps leaving them deflated coming into the new year, the Anfield outfit have quickly dispelled those concerns. The terrific goalscoring capabilities of Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah have shown no signs of waning, leading the north west club to five wins from five.

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Clint Dempsey is the captain of the US Men’s National soccer team, which is only fitting, because he is one of the most decorated soccer players in US history.

The $4 million dollars English club team Fulham offered Major League Soccer (MLS) for his services in 2006 was the highest amount ever offered for an MLS player. Dempsey went on to score the most goals in the Premier League in franchise history, including becoming the first American player to score a hat-trick in the English Premier League.

In 2012, he was transferred to Tottenham Hotspur for $6 million dollars and made the highest salaried US soccer player of all-time. Dempsey has scored the fastest goal in World Cup qualifying history (53 seconds) and is one of only two American players (along with Brian McBride) to score goals in multiple World Cup tournaments.

We spoke to Clint about working with the Degree DO: MORE campaign, the World Cup and his career.

1. Talk about your partnership with Degree: DO MORE and how one lucky soccer fan can win a trip to Brazil in June to support you and the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team.

Degree is working with soccer and promoting the game. And also they’ve got the new deodorant now out with Degree Motion Sense technology where the more you move the more protection you get. The cool thing about it the campaign is, if you go to degreesoccer.com, a fan can win a trip to Brazil to join us at the World Cup this summer, so that will be exciting.

Read the full interview here.

Soccer enthusiasts should check out this article [Insider subscription required] in the Aug. 24 issue of ESPN The Magazine. It’s about “The Everton Way,” which is a term used to describe the training method used by EPL team Everton, a club that doesn’t have money to poach the best players from other teams, so they have to cultivate it. Think of Everton as the Milwaukee Brewers of the EPL.

Tony Farrell (a.k.a. “Tosh”) is touring the U.S. holding clinics on the subject. More and more U.S. soccer associations are signing up and are starting to teach their kids the system, which focuses less on wins and losses and more about coaching and technique.

The Everton Way is many things, but at its center is this maxim: Great footballers are made, not born. Like every British team, Everton is permitted to sign kids as young as 9 years old to its youth academy. But, per the rules of the Football Association, which governs the EPL, no club may recruit any player who lives more than an hour’s drive from its training complex. The mandate was instituted long ago to keep the battle for young talent from turning ugly. The problem for Everton is that one-quarter of its scouting region is in the Irish Sea. So, over the past 20 years, the team has perfected a teaching strategy that, in truth, is more nuanced worldview than coaching dictum. There are no secret mantras or exotic drills in the Everton Way; most of the training techniques are identical to those used at other major soccer academies around the world. The difference is in the details, or more precisely in the club’s commitment to paying close attention to them. To the extent that the Everton Way has major tenets, they are as follows: 1) The best coaches should teach the youngest players, because lifelong habits are formed early; 2) all instructors should coach according to their expertise, which means you will never see an Under-16s coach holding forth on the potential of an Under-10s player; 3) winning doesn’t matter until kids are about 16; what does matter is technique and development; and 4) every year, at least one player who signed as a 9-year-old will debut with the pro club.

Could this be what finally makes U.S. soccer a constant on the international stage?