Football Ruined My Life

He has frequently been referred to as “the bastard in the black”. One person with a whistle can arouse more enmity than the worst tackle on a football field. We feel that their only purpose is to give decisions in our favour. If they give a decision or worse a goal against us they are obviously stupid, blind and arguably corrupt. Now of course we have VAR, so we don’t have to worry about the refer...

Jon Holmes, Paddy Barclay and Colin Shindler explore the impact of nature and nurture on footballers from the same family.  Is it genetic inheritance or environmental factors that accounts for the remarkable number of fraternal and father-son relationships in football over the decades?  From the famous Charltons to the Schmeichels, from the forgotten Rowley brothers to the Redknapps, the Cloughs a...

Jon Holmes, Paddy Barclay and Colin Shindler meet Gordon Milne who had a fascinating and long career in football.  He was a player with Tom Finney at Preston, a key part of Bill Shankly’s first great Liverpool side and later manager of Jimmy Hill's Coventry City and Jon’s beloved Leicester before moving abroad and winning three successive league titles for Besiktas in Turkey.  Now approaching his...

West Ham won the Cup in 1964, the European Cup Winners Cup in 1965 and, according to Alf Garnett, the World Cup in 1966. They were a stylish, attractive and at the time a victorious team in those mid 1960s but they never kicked on and those three World Cup heroes eventually left Upton Park in a disappointing anti-climax, not having won anything else at club level. For years though they were everyo...

Colin and Paddy attempt to make Jon feel better about the Midlands trophy desert. Looking at the Football League’s checkered history over the 135 years of its existence you can’t but be aware that the Midlands hasn’t pulled its weight.  Half of the founder members of the Football League were Midlands clubs so there seems to be no logical reason why the whole of the Midlands has won so much less th...

Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Patrick Barclay wonder whether the concept of sportsmanship has vanished from the game. We all remember that famous photograph of Bobby Moore and Pele exchanging sweat soaked shirts after their titanic struggle in Guadalajara in the 1970 World Cup group match. It was iconic because it symbolised and personified the concept. But is that sort of behaviour still around...

Back in the dim and distant past of our youth, the coverage of football on television was minimal and we instinctively turned to local and national newspapers for the latest information and analysis on the game and our favourite club. In subsequent years, and particularly since the emergence of Sky Sports in 1992, we have all seen the decline of the print journalist and the seemingly unstoppable r...

It’s everywhere. There’s at least one match on television every day, up to half a dozen over the weekend. The newspapers that used to devote a page to football now devote three. Radio5 Live exists, like Sky Sports, to broadcast football to the people who clearly want it. But, the panel ask themselves, is this media domination a good thing for the game and its supporters?  If less is more would the...

Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Patrick Barclay are joined by a long-standing Chelsea fan – the writer and broadcaster Andy Hamilton – to discuss his lifetime of support since the late 1950s. He shares his frustration that some of the less attractive developments in modern football have significantly diminished his passion for the club although, like the panellists, he remains dedicated to the gam...

As the first year of Football Ruined My Life draws to a close, the panel read out a selection of their favourite emails which have been received from listeners all over the world. They include trenchant observations on the panellists’ manifold failings as well as the writers’ childhood reminiscences and their reaction to the podcasts they’ve heard as well as suggestions for future subjects. Learn...

It was a most remarkable year.  It started with the Big Freeze, ended with the assassination of President Kennedy and included the emergence of the Beatles and the Profumo Affair. On the football field (as soon as the ice melted in April) it was equally notable with Alf Ramsey’s first game in charge of England, Leicester City missing out on the Double (sorry, Jon), Manchester United winning the Cu...

The former Chairman of the FA, David Bernstein, joins Colin, Paddy and Jon for an honest discussion on the failings of governance in football. He tells of how his attempts at reform of the FA were constantly thwarted and how the FA lost any battle they tried to fight against the overwhelming power of the big clubs once they had divested themselves of the old Football League. The discussion ranges...

It is the moment every footballer dreads – the day when he finally accepts that his career on the field is over. Jon tells Patrick and Colin that even those who have made a spectacular success of life after football like Gary Lineker can never recreate the joy of scoring a goal. Retirement is supposed to be much better for players these days because of the money they have earned during their caree...

All three panellists are fans of clubs that have suffered the indignity of relegation from the Premier League in the 21st century. There is a fear that the ever widening gap with the Championship will see clubs doomed to wait indefinitely in the purgatory of the footballing equivalent of Siberia. Yet Manchester City and Fulham bounced back to the top tier the following season and Leicester look as...

Any devoted watcher of the BBC Television series Lovejoy would have noticed the East Anglian antiques dealer’s ubiquitous Manchester United coffee mug and Manchester United travel bag. The actor who played Lovejoy, Ian McShane was the son of the Manchester United outside left Harry McShane who won a League Championship medal at Old Trafford in the 1951-2 season. In this podcast Ian McShane explain...

We all know what it’s like to have too little of it and though it’s probably not anything that most of us have experienced we can understand that having too much money doesn’t always lead straight to Happiness. At the top of the pyramid, football is drowning in the stuff, at the bottom too many clubs are struggling to keep their heads above the financial waters that are closing in. Colin Shindler,...

When we watch football as youngsters it is the goals that catch our eye, not the vital defensive midfielders or the manager’s clever/stupid substitutions. A Gary Lineker tap in is less spectacular than a Bobby Charlton thunderbolt but in a vital 1-0 victory it counts for as much. Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Patrick Barclay discuss the scorers of great goals and great goalscorers from Ted Drake...

Time was when there was scarcely an English top flight team without a few influential Scotsmen in it. Can you imagine Liverpool in the 1980s without Hansen, Souness and Dalglish, Manchester United’s 1960s team without Denis Law and Paddy Crerand or Revie’s Leeds United without Bremner, Jordan, McQueen, Lorimer and Eddie Gray? There are almost no Scottish players in the English Premier League, bare...

If you’re an actor or a writer and you love football, you may think that being involved in a movie or television series about football would be, in the unmistakable words of the great German forward Harry Kane, “a dream come true”. However, from ‘United!’, the 1965 BBC tv soap opera, to ‘Ted Lasso’, the current American comedy drama hit show about AFC Richmond, the many attempts to persuade the fo...

Is the Champions League better or worse than the old European Cup? Do we all support British teams in Europe the way we did before the Bosman ruling altered the complexion of British football? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Spirit of Shankly seems to stand for everything that is good about football. He is still revered at Liverpool and respected throughout the world of football. What made him unique? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Simon Inglis, author of books on the football grounds of Great Britain and the football grounds of Europe, joins the team to give his expert knowledge of the building of some of football's most iconic grounds - Highbury, Maine Road, Old Trafford, Craven Cottage, Filbert Street etc. Do the fans revel in the creature comforts of the new stadiums or do they still hanker for the ramshackle tumbledown...

Between 1959 and 1972 ten different clubs won the English First Division. What has happened to that competitiveness? Is the much-lauded Premier League a better competition than the old First Division? Why has this pattern been repeated in so many other European leagues? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The panel are forbidden from praising their own teams and have to confess their admiration for other domestic and international teams. There are a few surprises… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He remains the only England manager to have won the men's World Cup. The FA sacked him when he was 54 and apart from a brief caretaker stint at Birmingham City his career was over. Is he loved or just admired? Was he a great manager? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices