A long time ago at an international sports media outlet far far away, I was employed as a football writer.
Not just any football writer. I had no ‘patch’, I had no area of expertise. I was a peripatetic gob-for-hire, dispatched to St James’ Park one week, Stamford Bridge the next, and called upon in the days between to deliver 1,000 words of opinion on anything from Borussia Dortmund’s new manager, an excitable chap by the name of Klopp, to the emergence of some kid called Kylian at Monaco.
It was a lovely job, but a pretty wide remit.
What I really needed was some sort of podcast that would tell me all the big news first thing in the morning, so I didn’t miss anything. It would have to be international, not parochial. It wouldn’t just read out the scores, it would tell me what those scores meant. Nothing too formidable. Just something I could swiftly ingest while I made a pot of tea, or my daughter’s packed lunch before school. Something for the walk to the station, as opposed to for the train journey itself.
What I also discovered was that I was not alone. When I spoke to other people, they wanted something like that, too.
Here’s a thing you can easily forget if you work in the media for too long: Most people aren’t on X. Most people aren’t constantly plugged into the news cycle. Most people have partners and families and friends and adventures. Some stuff cuts through, but it’s easy to miss big stories when real life has the temerity to intrude.
But no one made me that podcast. Not even me, when I actually had a podcast production company of my own. The hours were just too anti-social, the remit too broad. But after a slow drift from podcast production through to pretend Football Management and then into the sunlit uplands of actual middle management, an opportunity emerged. And so The Daily Football Briefing launched last summer.
It’s had a good first year, but we’ve now made a few adjustments under the bonnet.
- No single show will last longer than 10 minutes, or I’ll stab myself in the leg with a fork.
- No more dawdling. We’re in and we’re out, and we’re onto the next story.
- I’m hosting every show. Feel free to consider this either an egomaniacal Robbie Savage-like power grab or the end-result of someone looking around the office and thinking, “Hmm…Whose social life is the least likely to be affected by not being able to go out in the evenings for a month?”.
We’ve got everything you need to know about the European Championship and the Copa America (because we’ll wait until those games are finished before releasing) and all the big football news, in under 10 minutes.
But more than that, we can help point you to the best stuff on The Athletic. The best long reads, the best tactical previews, the best long-form podcasts and the best videos.
And we’re a thriving community now. We want you to weigh in with your opinions on the biggest issues of the day like, “Are Spain really that good?”, or, “Is it OK to support more than one club?”, and, “What will the changes to the rules of Dungeons & Dragons mean to my game?”. That last one might be just me.
We’re basically the perfect primer for your day. So, give The Daily Football Briefing a listen today. If you like it, subscribe, and you’ll never miss a big football story again. And if you don’t like it, we’ve got loads of other brilliant shows you can try instead.
You can listen to The Daily Football Briefing wherever you get your podcasts. It will be released every single day until July 15. Contact Iain by emailing imacintosh@theathletic.com, through the comments box on the app or at LinkedIn.
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