Football Ruined My Life

In our last edition before the World Cup break, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes are joined by the distinguished author and journalist Duncan Hamilton.  Duncan has written almost twenty books on various aspects of football and cricket including three William Sports Book of the Year winners.  Among those twenty are biographies of George Best, Harold Larwood and Neville Cardus, a fascinating portrait o...

Today we’ll be following on our discussion of football in the 1980s with an entirely self-indulgent session of selecting the team of that decade.  To help Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler to do so they are delighted to be able to call on the services of Steve Coppell, a man who was playing for Manchester United and England at the start of the decade and at the end of it was the manager of Crystal Pal...

In this podcast episode Jim White, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes turn their attention to one of the darkest decades in recent football history - the 1980s.  It wasn’t all bad.  We got to the quarter finals of the World Cup in 1986 and were unlucky to lose to a goal punched past Shilton by the Hand of God.  We had a fascinating rivalry at the top of the game between the two sides based in Liverpool...

This week the Andy Hamilton, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler discuss the year 1970, which, to their collective astonishment, is 56 years ago. It’s Colin’s favourite year and much treasured by the 20-year-old Jon. Meanwhile the teenage Andy Hamilton skipped school to watch Chelsea beat Leeds in an infamous FA Cup Final replay (and was found out) and ignored his O level revision to watch Brazil v Urug...

Today Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes look once more at the emails you’ve sent us since we did our last postbag at the end of last year.  We encourage you to write to us every week and you do so in comforting numbers.  Once again the tone is almost entirely positive with people wanting to contribute their own memories to the topic they’ve just listened to… or correcting our very fallible memories.  ...

Tony Woodcock was one of Jon Holmes’ earliest clients, a superb player who scored 139 goals in 437 appearances for Nottingham Forest, FC Koln and Arsenal besides the 16 goals scored in 42 appearances for England. This record compares favourably with Jon and Colin Shindler’s combined contribution of no goals at all at professional level.  It is therefore entirely appropriate that we leave the discu...

This week Jim White, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes wonder if the gap will ever narrow between the Championship and the Premier League.  In 1964 Leeds United were promoted from the Second Division and in their first season in Division 1 they lost the League Championship to Manchester United only on goal average (as it then was).  In the 1976-77 season Nottingham Forest finished third in the Second...

This week Andy Hamilton, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes discuss turning points in football history.  The historian A.J.P. Taylor, a name that has never graced a football podcast previously famously described the 1848 revolutions, particularly in Germany, as a "turning point in history that failed to turn".  Well the panel now discuss those moments in football history which were significant turning...

This week’s special guest on the podcast is the distinguished historian Dominic Sandbrook, author of magisterial histories of Britain from 1956 to 1982 and of course a co-host of the podcast The Rest is History.  More to the point, however, he is a passionate supporter of Wolverhampton Wanderers whom we have shamefully neglected in our previous 134 plus podcasts, mainly because we have been waitin...

This week Omid Djalili, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler discuss the sort of player who should have played for their country but never did, players who lacked the ebullience to stand out from their more aggressive and extrovert team mates and players -  wherever they operated in the football pyramid.  Players who were the unshowy but reliable… who got the ball, made ground and passed accurately to a...

This week Colin Shindler, Andy Hamilton and Jon Holmes gather to discuss whether there are more 17 and 18 year old players coming into the game than there used to be in the postwar years.  Has the abandonment of the A and B sides and more significantly the reserve leagues – like the Central League and the Football Combination – changed things for the better?  Can young players learn much by sittin...

It’s the view of Football Ruined My Life that many football supporters used to buy broadsheet newspapers specifically to read Geoffrey Green or Brian Glanville or David Lacey or Hugh McIlvanney – four hugely respected titans of the art of writing about football matches for the next day’s paper.  In this edition, Jim White of the Daily Telegraph joins Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler to explain why hi...

This week Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler are joined by the investigative journalist Michael Crick whose appearances down the years on Newsnight and Channel 4 News have made him a familiar face on our television screens.  Despite being a friend of Colin, he is a longtime supporter of Manchester United, having had the decency to grow up in Manchester.  In this episode he talks about the power of nati...

There was a time before 1966 when crowds were a lot friendlier and less angry than they are today.  Supporters of opposing clubs stood together on the terraces and policing was relegated to one copper on a horse outside the ground as you came in.  Crowds in the immediate postwar years were large and though the grounds were already starting to crumble, club directors saw no need to spend money upda...

Andy Hamilton, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler ask the question “Has the match day experience improved over the years they have been going to watch football?”   You would think the answer would be that of course it has.  We all have a seat, the food, whatever the price, couldn’t be worse than it was in the 1960s and ‘70s, we are never caught in those frightening swayings on the terraces and the club...

The television interview with a British manager after a match has become quite a rare bird, although recent events at Manchester United and Chelsea have slightly altered that perception.  Prior to those appointments, Eddie Howe, Sean Dyche and David Moyes flew the Union Jack and we currently also have Rob Edwards and Scott Parker – though their stay in the Premier League looks destined to be over...

Recently we had the Africa Cup of Nations with that absurd ending rescued by the grown up behaviour of Sadio Mane.  During the course of the competition we were constantly reminded of how much Mo Salah means to the people of Egypt.  However, Omid Djalili, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes also look at the downside.  When Luis Suarez was sent off for biting for the third time in the 2014 World Cup afte...

When the Football League started in 1888 there were six clubs from the Midlands and six from Lancashire.  Now look at the Premier League.  Of the current 20 clubs, nine come from the effete South of England, in other words almost half.  Jon Holmes, Colin Shindler and Jim White discuss whether this is a North-South divide or a London-versus-the-rest-of-the-country divide.  We know to what extent fo...

Colin Shindler asks Jon Holmes and Andy Hamilton to relive their football related nightmares.  They are forced under forensic questioning to remember what they had hoped they had buried forever in the deepest recesses of their memories.  In other words, those defeats which evoke the very darkest of thoughts.  They don’t have to be 9-0 thrashings to do that.  They can be games when you’re 1-0 up an...

This week Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Jim White pay tribute to some of the players who died in 2025 plus two journalists and one referee.  As most of our listeners are probably in their 60s and 70s, the deaths of players like Billy Bonds, John Robertson and perhaps above all Denis Law bring to the surface fears about our own mortality.  If you loved the football and the footballers of the 1960s...

Anyone who watches The Big Match Revisited every Saturday morning on ITV4 will notice that referees in the 1970s and 1980s used to wave play on so much more often - which meant that the game flowed and wasn’t constantly hauled back for yet another free kick.  You also pretty much had to amputate an opponent’s leg below the knee before you could be sent off.  A sending off in the 1960s and 1970s wa...

This week the Colin, Jon and Omid are talking about those players beloved by the fans but usually underrated by fans of other clubs. In other words, club legends -  usually players who play for one club for the whole of their career who do not appear to be tempted by a transfer to a club more likely to win trophies… and who certainly wouldn’t leave the club just for the sake of increasing even by...

Every year at this time we ensure that we have a postbag of your emails to spread joy and happiness among the growing Football Ruined My Life community.  We encourage you to write to us every week and you do so in comforting numbers.  Once again the tone is almost entirely positive with people wanting to contribute their own memories to the topic they’ve just listened to or correcting our very fal...

Following on from the last episode (the special on FIFA and their Peace Prize that was awarded to Donald Trump), this week Jon Holmes, Andy Hamilton and Colin Shindler ask themselves the question: “Is the game more or less exciting than it was when we first started watching football in the late 1950s/early 1960s?” It certainly seems to be more exciting to judge by the hysterical radio and televisi...

This is a shorter but very special edition of Football Ruined My Life. It was recorded three days after the sickening and humiliating farrago of nonsense which was the draw for the 2026 World Cup. It contained, of course, the sickening sight of a convicted felon being awarded a Peace Prize. The sheer inanity of the exercise made it entirely nonsensical. Within minutes of the draw starting, our pro...