About me
A bit about me...
It all started at university in the late '90s. I did my year out at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in Spain. My European Studies lecturers back in the UK required a 10,000-word dissertation and, remarkably, they allowed me to pursue my hypothesis: Regional Identity in Spain as Expressed Through Football: A Case Study of Real Madrid v FC Barcelona. This was before there was much writing in English about football and politics beyond Simon Kuper's Football Against the Enemy.
Something went right, because I came away with a 2:1. I then built a career in business-to-business technology communications and parked writing about football for years.
Then, in 2015, I launched Outside Write as a blog to chronicle my groundhopping at the time. That escalated into a podcast the following year covering all aspects of football travel, history, and culture.
Outside Write now lives on Substack for long-form articles. Meanwhile, I have published 250+ episodes of the podcast, and my guests have included David Goldblatt, Jonathan Wilson, Tim Vickery, and Michael Cox.
In 2021, my first book, Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World, came out via Pitch Publishing.
The following year, my second book, The Defiant: A History of Football Against Fascism, came out and has probably become the book I am best known for.
However, I always wanted to write a travel book, and it was difficult to find a topic that no one had really covered.
So, I travelled around the island of Ireland to research my third book, Shades of Green: A Journey into Irish Football (2025). I feel that few places' football mirrors the sociopolitics of a geography as much as Ireland. Shades of Green was named talkSPORT's Book of the Week when it came out.
My fourth book, Barrio Clubs: Football in the Shadow of Iberian Giants, is out in 2027 and looks at identity and society in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon and Porto.
I have also written features for Glory Magazine, Football Weekends, Panenka (NL) and Halb Vier, among others.
I'd love to write for you. Please get in touch: