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Podcasts are one of the world's best and worst inventions. The app stores might be flooded with vapid celebrity content, but searching a little bit deeper can reveal some amazing things. Football is extremely well represented and there are some really good contemporary podcasts amongst the drek but I find football history fascinating and of late, a number of podcasts have explored the fertile fields of the past with notable success - below are my current indulgences.
Jonathan Wilson is a national treasure. I say that, fully aware of the fact that 'man who applies his obvious intellect to knowing a dangerous amount of information about obscure football information' might not seem the most obvious qualification for the status but, for me, anyone who has dedicated this much of his life to knowing line ups from games played before he was born deserves recognition.
Alongside Rob Draper, the pair tell stories of football from the past. The series started in fairy mainstream territory but has since stepped from the path and it's account of a 1970s match fixer who survived Auschwitz and the origins of the FA ban for women's football have been particular highlights.
This is a disciplined and well produced podcast where the pair swap roles as questioner and story teller depending on who is the expert on the subject matter. It is detailed without being overwhelming and their skill in managing the exposition of a narrative is as impressive as their knowledge.
This is like so many podcasts at the moment in the sense of it being a group of blokes who talk about football and laugh from time to time whilst poking gentle fun at each other. The difference with this one is the topic is largely football of the past, sometimes given full nostalgic focus and sometimes compared to modern day.
The team (Patrick Barkley, former Leicester City chairman and football agent John Holmes and author Colin Schindler) are knowledgeable in different ways and have a breadth of memories and views on the modern game.
Each episode tends to focus on a theme (i.e goalkeepers or flair players) and it manages to walk the fine line between interesting memories and indulgent nostalgia very well. It is, essentially, 3 very knowledgeable and interesting older fellas chatting about football for about an hour. What's not to like?
Tim Vickery is an expert on world football. Dotun Adebayo is an amenable conversationalist who has lived a fantastically interesting life. The pair are probably best known for the 'World Football Phone In' - a late night show on Radio 5 that is the antidote to the parochial and often pointlessly combative emptiness of 606.
This podcast is the pair of them, stretching out into the infinite space allowed by the medium and chatting shit about this and that. The premise is simple - take a game from football history, analyse the match itself and then study the social context via the music charts of the day. It sometimes features a guest related to that game (usually someone who was there) and other times is just Dotun and Tim.
This is the least 'slick' of the content listed. It's full of digressions, slips of the tongue and thinking out loud. That's not a criticism. It's lovely to hear the game talked about in a different way, devoid of the usual narrow cliches and urgency to keep a new cycle moving forward. As podcasting becomes the mainstream, so many productions seem to seek to create radio style content, with high production values and urgent compression into short segments with slick links to as breaks and sponsors. This is a podcast of the old skool style, two mates chatting without an eye on the clock and little regard for structure.
The pair have a genuine warmth for each other and have explored a creditable breadth of matches, moving seamlessly between decades, continents and clubs.
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All of the above podcasts are beautiful things in that they place the game in a context. They remind you of how it has changed and how the values of both football and society aren't fixed. As I get older, I've found history more interesting, I've come to appreciate that the past begats the future and to understand the present, you have to understand the past and all this content provide a welcome journey to a different world.
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