Just in time for the 2013 AT&T MLS All-Star Game, MLSsoccer.com and Howler Magazine have released the second edition of Overlap, a digital magazine available for iPad and Android tablets. (Coming soon: iPhone.)

As the tagline says, Overlap tells "stories from North American soccer" -- stories about MLS and beyond that deserve to be told in depth, with color and with urgency, to reveal the characters, the scenes, and the storylines that are shaping today's soccer culture.

Overlap is available on iTunes, through the Apple Newsstand, and on Android tablets. It comes out four times a year. The next issue will be out in October.

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Read the editors' note below:

Playing at home is a special thing. It’s where the crowd’s got your back—at least at kickoff—and your family is in the stands. Those things mattered greatly to Fire forward Mike Magee, who spent years trying to get back to Chicago after leaving to make a career as a professional soccer player when he was still a teenager. Since joining his hometown team in May, Magee has been extraordinary, scoring in his first seven games.

Magee had been in form all season, well before LA sent him to Chicago in a trade for Robbie Rogers, but what was more surprising was the change that came over the Fire upon his arrival. A team with only two wins in its first 11 regular season games suddenly went on a streak, winning seven of its next eight. In the two months since the trade, Chicago has taken 47 percent more shots and scored a whopping 215 percent more goals per 90 minutes. In the cover story for this issue of Overlap, “The Spark,” writer Daniel Libit reveals how Magee’s decade playing in New York and LA prepared him, eventually, to return home and become a leader in Chicago.

By the look of things at midseason, two of MLS’s three Canadian clubs will make the playoffs in 2013. But in Olivier Tremblay’s article “Canadian Idol,” we learn that the present isn’t as bright as the future for the Montreal Impact, Toronto FC, and Vancouver Whitecaps, all of whom are putting serious resources into developing homegrown talent.

There it is again: home. That’s really the unifying thread of this edition of Overlap. We’ve got a game-day look at Sporting Kansas City’s mesmerizing home, Sporting Park, which also happens to be the host of the 2013 AT&T MLS All-Star Game. This year, the MLSers take on Italian side A.S. Roma, and in his article “Eurovision,” Kansas City-based writer Paolo Bandini discovers the Old World’s changing attitudes toward MLS, including an Italian journalist’s warning that the “growing phenomenon” of MLS is only just beginning.

Closer to home, writer Noah Davis gets a free-kick lesson from the New England Revolution’s Lee Nguyen, and Real Salt Lake defender Chris Wingert gives us all a lesson in perseverance as he talks us through the four stages of a long-term injury and rehabilitation that kept him out at the start of this season and from which he has only recently returned.

We hope you enjoy this edition of Overlap, whether you’re reading it out at the field, on a plane, or, you know, at home.

Greg Lalas

MLSsoccer.com

George Quraishi

Howler Magazine

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