UP495 Joey D'Urso on how football shirts explain the world

0:00Yeah, I mean this idea of major events being a sort of democratising force, I think it's almost the opposite. If you look at Qatar, if you look at Saudi Arabia, World Cup in 2034, sport is used to sort of bolster authoritarianism. There's no pretense that Saudi Arabia 2034 will be some sort of democratic event. You know, there's some pretty delusional comments when Newcastle United were taken over that this would somehow further the cause of democracy. I think it's the opposite.

0:21Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:Hello, welcome to Unofficial Partner. That was the voice of Joey D 'Urso, our guest today. Jerry is an award-winning journalist from The Times and before that The Athletic and he's written a very good book called More Than a Shirt, how football shirts explain global politics, money and power. Each chapter is its own narrative embedded within football shirts extending beyond mere sport. It talks about geopolitics, economics, social issues such as Russia's influence through gas companies, Colombia's history with drug cartels and the impact of gambling, liberalisation. It also examines the evolution of women's football via Mary Earp's shirt and its reflection of global gender equality alongside discussions about financial shifts, immigration, national identity as expressed through club affiliations.

1:08Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:So overall, he argues every football shirt tells a story and we get him to tell a few today. This episode of Unofficial Partner is brought to you by Sidley Sport. Sidley Sport is a new breed of agency that combines world-class creativity with deep sponsorship expertise, flawless operational delivery and a culture of marketing effectiveness. We've got to know the team over the last few months. They're an impressive bunch who believe that sports marketing can and should be done better. They've got a creative philosophy of producing famous campaigns and activations that build buzz and conversation in a category that too often looks and sounds the same.

1:48Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:And they're pioneering a new standard of effectiveness in sports marketing using econometrics and attribution models to go beyond traditional media ROI. So if you're looking for an agency to take your brand to the top, get in touch with the team at Sid Lee Sport, where brands become champions.

2:14Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:I really enjoyed the book. I'm really looking forward to this. thank you yeah no it's great and it's so there's a couple of things one is it is absolutely bang there's a load of things in here that we'll talk about in a minute about the you know shirts i had an idea for a book this is about 15 years ago which has echoes of yours which is about the england shirt and telling the story of england oh you know using the different versions of the shirt going back to 66 and you know because there's a whole sort of thing about trying to find the 66 11 shirts of 60 there's a sort of cottage industry of people looking didn't someone sell one for loads of money recently or a few years ago well no one can find bobby moore shirt so the most famous shirt in british history is never is lost it's in and uh you know that that's the start of the tale but anyway that's a we won't get into that but i love this i want to just get to the beginning let's talk about well you set the set the thing up for me first of all give us a you know the obvious question about what sure the so the idea is that football shirts explain the world and as you you know run around the park and watch kids playing football or watch catch a game in the corner of the pub or wherever and you see football shirts they tell stories often political stories stories about money and power and there are some of those that are pretty obvious you know arsenal and emirates or man city and etihad pretty obviously talks to middle eastern politics but what i found as i've traveled around the world and spoke to countless people is that there are so many more kind of subtle and obscure stories told through football shirts about his crime about the rise of china about gender politics about all sorts of things that maybe aren't immediately obvious to the naked eye it's fantastic route in and let's start the beginning because there's a nice you're from bournville yeah yeah that's right in birmingham cabri-world villa fan so let's talk let's let's use that as a route in because i think that both those bits are relevant i was watching the other day chelsea win the club world cup and they were didn't have a logo on their shirt and the the question in the unofficial partner whatsapp group was what's the value of that picture you know the trump moment cole palmer that's the the picture's gone around the world and and what would have been the you know the return on investment of that shirt villa take me back to the sort of days of villa and your first shirt yeah so i was born in 92 a month younger than the sorry six months older than the premier league feb 92 it was born in august 92 and yeah so the shirts in my it would have been ast computers the muller yogurts the glory years so villa i'm one of these rare people who've never seen my team win anything club or country because i villa won league cups in 94 and 96 and i'm just a bit too young to remember that i remember the 98 world cup and michael own very well but that's the sort of start of my football memory but the one i talk about in the book is the 2002 three villa shirt so my grandmother when she my granddad died and she moved house and she freed up a bit of cash and she gave i was the oldest grandchild so she gave me 100 pounds basically and was like this is for you it's not to be sensibly invested in a building society whatever this is to do whatever a 10 year old boy wants to do with it and i was like okay i want to go down to jgb sports and buy the latest full villa kit which at the time had rover on the front um pretty sort of bang average team to be honest duraz vassal and juan pablo engel and players like that various mid table dross but um rover of course is the big car factory in long bridge on the southern edge of Birmingham which made sort of mass market cars and you know now I mean I've got a friend who works at the Jaguar Land Rover factory in Birmingham that's still there but that's high-end fancy cars you know mass market cars aren't really made in Britain anymore since Rover closed it doesn't exist because it's cheaper to make it in Eastern Europe or in Asia so about three years after that shirt I wore that shirt Rover imploded it went insolvent so that shirt which I wore as a kid and have lots of photos wearing basically yeah it tells the story of british industrial decline basically i know and and it's also the legacy of british layland my dad used to drive you know we bought series of rovers and morris's and austin's and you know and to be fair they were terrible cars but they were you know that sort of heritage yeah it was ldv vans a few years before which i was that yeah i always think of bournville my daughter went to university in birmingham so she lived sort of not far from there yeah yes exactly and when i sort of go there I sort of think it's hard not to think of the sort of Cadbury's story.

6:30Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:And it's almost the story of the last sort of 50 years or 100 years where you've got, Bourneville is obviously built and it's an incredible, people who haven't been there should go there. It's a beautifully built sort of little village. It's almost like a model village these days. But it was built with chocolate money, wasn't it? It was Quakers and they established that sort of home for the people who were working for the company. and then as you go forward we know Cadbury's today but Cadbury's is their marketing still talks to generosity and they're sort of Quaker upping but they are sort of a you know a ruthlessly sort of capitalistic company owned by yeah it was a really big deal I mean you know and people just felt it so kind of emotionally living there because it's a rare place where the company is so tight I mean and I think now it's it's a bit I don't know artificial the wrong word but it doesn't employ that many people right a lot of it is mechanized when i was a kid i was 25 years some kids in my primary school whose parents work there but you know certainly doesn't it's not like it was 100 years ago where most people but it was founded as a village like outside of birmingham you know this big dirty industrial city and it was four or five miles outside now it's just a suburb yeah it's a pretty idyllic place to be honest and it still is it's beautiful but the idea of a company building a village for its works you know now that all of that money has gone to shareholders it's gone to the ceo it's gone to you know that that is just such a thing that would never i can't imagine it i can't imagine amazon doing it i can't imagine you know major companies doing that yeah and that whole thing was that you know in the big cities like birmingham workers were living in horrendous conditions and slums you know unsanitary horrible stuff and they met the whole thing was kind of fresh air and green air and there's so much green and there's a kind of recreation ground and a pavilion and nice well-built houses and all that sort of thing so yeah it's a pretty amazing place to be honest and obviously it has lost a bit of that with with 2009 and craft but yeah pretty nice place to to grow up okay let's go through what's your the i've got a favorite what's your favorite story from the just take because and we should explain that each chapter is a is a routine it's a shirt and a and some stories attached so i gas prom is one that i like purely because it's that it's in that category of everyone's kind of heard of it but maybe doesn't quite understand how mad it is we can briefly rattle through that one or maybe pick up another one so Gazprom of course sponsored the UEFA Champions League for I mean the best part of 20 years you know the incredibly famous images of Liverpool lifting it in Madrid or Gareth Bale's overhead kick or Messi Ronaldo all of that has Gazprom advertising all over it Schalke one of the biggest teams in Germany was sponsored by Gazprom from 2007 to 2022 Gazprom a Russian state gas company basically a vehicle of Russian state aggression in Ukraine and it basically tells the story of Germany cozying up to Russia over a very long period of time Russia selling cheap gas to Germany, Germany turning a bit of a blind eye to Putin's political repression, this sort of cosy relationship that got more and more awkward when Putin invaded Crimea in 2014.

9:20And then in 2022, when Putin invaded the whole of Ukraine, it all became crumbling down. And this relationship of Gazprom and Schalker, and I went over there and I spoke to loads of people in Germany, tells that story really of this, you know, the close ties between Europe and particularly Germany and the Russian, what turned out to be this sort of dictatorship and war machine.

9:38Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:There's a great quote in there. Bernard Blumenauer, I don't quite know who he is, but trade was meant to deter Putin from aggressive power politics, but it increased Germany's dependence on cheap Russian gas and other raw materials, which I think captures it really nicely. Yeah, he's a professor at St. Andrews, I believe. Yeah, I can't remember the German word for it. Of course the Germans have got a word for it. There's a word that means a sort of economic independence, basically. The German philosophy was if we bring these guys close to us, they'll become more democratic. You've seen a similar thing with China, you know, bring them into the capitalist economy, buy more stuff from them, and they'll inevitably start having elections and stuff.

10:12You know, that hasn't worked, to put it mildly. But that was the sort of philosophy of Germany, you know, post-war destruction, industrialized, huge manufacturing success in the 50s and 60s, but it didn't have much in the way of natural resources. The coal fields that Gelsenkirchen and Schalke were built on were kind of running dry. So it was just sort of mutually, you know, Germany wanted the natural resources, Russia wanted the expertise of the german industrialists and their money and their cash because it's a much richer country so it's this sort of fatal embrace between the two countries there's a it's interesting that

10:42Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:because there's sort of that you mentioned the the china thing i mean running into would have been beijing olympics that we we should be doing business with them because and sport is a route in it's soft power major events as a sort of strategic sort of device which was very much to the messaging from the IOC and its acolytes and around sport and pushing okay we need to build bridges and you're right in that that's I just wonder how that looks from the other side because obviously when you're dealing with Putin or when you're dealing with with authoritarian you know regimes they must look at sport and think well yes of course it does brilliant things and but we're second guessing their objectives aren't we yeah I mean this idea of major events being a sort of democratizing force I think it's almost the opposite if you look at Qatar if you look at Saudi Arabia World Cup in 2034 sport is used to sort of bolster authoritarianism there's no pretense that Saudi Arabia 2034 will be some sort of democratic event you know there's some pretty delusional comments when Newcastle United were taken over that this would somehow sort of further the cause of democracy I think it's the opposite.

11:45Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:In terms of the Gazprom thing what's the impact on the team on Schalke in terms of that because you know we often talk about the sponsor but I quite often wonder what the reflection is and what that looks like and it there's a sort of short-term long-term question and we don't quite know what the long-term question you know answer is yet because sometimes fans are sort of used you know manipulated or you know the voice of the fan and people talk about fan engagement and look at how you know the money is going to buy it by players but is there anything else going on there yeah so i mean just taking back to the shirt which had gasp on it for so long people taped it over though the fans could handed out blue stickers with the same shade of blue as the shirt, which then taped over the gas pumps.

12:25And I saw lots of people wearing these. What I think is interesting about it is that, you know, it's easy to say, oh, this is immoral, this is unethical, which it kind of is. But for these people who are Schalke fans, that shirt was some of the happiest memories of their lives, potentially. You know, they won the German Cup. They got the semifinals of the Champions League in 2011. They had this heartbreaking last day of the season defeat to win the Bundesliga, and I think it was 2007. So it's quite hard to just be like, oh, just stick that in a drawer and, you know, let's talk about how evil Putin is.

12:50Because so many kind of powerful memories are wrapped up in supporting our football team. So I think there's a sort of slightly awkward, everyone from Schalke agrees it was bad, but it's hard to just put all those memories in the bin. I mean, certainly I think, and it's the same is true in the UK, people thought Russia was pretty bad and not a place that we didn't like Mr. Putin. But until February 2022, I think there was a sort of incident that quickly just completely crumbled. It was such an aggressive act. The narrative just changed overnight. It became inexcusable.

13:19Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:Yeah. You're right. the shirt i think i don't know whether i'm older than you and i can remember when shirts were just so boring you know and we had steve perriman on this you know old spurs player but he the reason we had him on is that steve perriman sports was the shop on i grew up in hayes in west london and he had a shop and it was our you know it was we had our it was our mecca and he would sell did he work the tills he did work the tills and and he would sort of the he would have a wall of shirts and you say right i'm a spurs fan so you go in he gives you a white shirt and then he would sew really a badge on okay and they would do it in the shop and they would iron it on and it was years before rights deals and whatever so if he wanted a red shirt or a blue shirt and a white shirt you know basically it's a very basic thing and then the admiral thing came came along and i remember the england kit 82 no no no no we were talking before that so it was mid 70s and you had england were terrible they didn't qualify for any world cups but we had a great kit and we would i remember this being just such a prized thing an admiral being the first badge you ever saw and then you get to that sort of hitachi yeah staying with liverpool 79 yeah and it's but they are very evocative things and i think i've retained a sort of obsession is too strong a word but just a really they're very evocative they're emotionally nostalgia is wrapped up into it and when i see today we have people on who are sort of you know from the marketing agencies who are kit launch has become the sort of genre it's just this great sort of moment and villa they've just done a brilliant one with ozzy osborne you know and it's all about tapping into that those stories so you're right about you know the gas prom thing you can't just put these things in a drawer they are incredibly powerful real estate well i think maybe it's i mean i've never really thought about this before before you describe like that but maybe it's you know think about the things you were interested when you were like five literally five or six years old like really really young and most of that now would be you know kiddie rubber you know like the teletubbies or whatever um like stuff that you're not gonna be interested in as an adult but some of it is yeah football shirts that i remember jvc arsenal shirt whenever i see it because i would have been five or six and they're which is very evocative that manchester united sharp shirt yeah and you know tottenham and holston and all those things from when i was just becoming football aware it really sort of hit something in your brain that was like when you're first really being aware of the world outside sort of i don't know your house and your parents faces and whatever else is yeah with those shirts well you sort of you are put back into a sort of time and place aren't you straight away you know when when i see you know that there's a whole it's now become a sort of industrialized but there was something quite exotic about a football shirt and now it's completely ubiquitous you know they're everywhere but i there's a bit of me that remembers them being okay that was a little bit special if you saw you saw a coventry shirt someone wear you know of the blue and the again the admiral they're just it was it was it's really again tapping into something very powerful i think let's let's talk about that again just to sort of counter people's expectations because the book is i picked up the thinking okay i'm gonna i'm expecting some of these stories and you mentioned them at the beginning and then get to power you know global politics and you get to sort of sports washing and and we do a lot of that on this podcast in terms of you know what is it and does it work and all those questions there's one in here that i really like which is the sort of which is it's grubbier but also more interesting it's less corporate which is the sort of more about organized crime and it's the south american colombian story can we talk about that is it and I'm struggling with my pronunciation you put me right is it Envigado?

16:57Envigado absolutely the the club that gave the world James Rodriguez you know arguably the best Colombian footballer of all time maybe Carlos Valderrama would have a word to say about that but it's just outside Medellin which I went there and it's an incredible place Medellin you know it's beautiful it's booming it's like full of sort of Brits backpacking and you know it's a really kind of fun place lots going on in the early 90s it was literally the most dangerous place in the world it's the highest murder rate of any city in the world ever in the era of sort of reliable statistics people were just gunned down all over the place it was pablo escobar have you seen that netflix program

17:27Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:narcos you know i was going to say narcos did it no favors then did it in terms of like you know sort of it's kind of glamorizes it a bit to be honest they really don't like it there because it makes it makes escobar seem kind of cool whereas he's a really horrible man yeah but just people you know i think you get paid sort of 20 to like kill a policeman and you bring his head to escobar you know it's incredible levels of just violence and and really horrible stuff going on And football was a huge part of that. And Escobar was, I don't know if owner is quite the right word, but very connected to the club Atletico Nacional in Medellin.

17:56Milanos, America, De Cali were all owned by the drug cartels. Yeah, there's a great story, which I tell in the book, where people are just watching this football match. And this was before the drug scene had really caught on in the early 80s. And then a sort of flyers came fluttering over the stadium. And everyone was like, you know, what is this? Is this an advert, whatever? And people picked it up and it was basically the cartels were fighting this war against the sort of left-wing guerrillas who were kidnapping people. And they basically said, like, we're going to murder you. We're going to hunt you down.

18:20We're going to kill you. And it's just like written on this thing as people were sitting in the match. So Columbia suddenly became this really violent place. Football was a huge part of that. It was a way for people to sort of show their peacock feathers. You know, if you're a big drug boss, it's a place for you to entertain people. It's a place to be the big man. You know, Escobar used to pay for football pitches in the sort of slums, in the barrières.

18:39Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:Yeah, that's part of Narcos, isn't it? There's a sort of thread in Narcos about his interest in football. It's quite an interesting corporate hospitality gig. yeah yeah well there's a lot yeah a lot of corporate hospitality there i can imagine laid on by the narcos and yeah i mean just going a bit further back like cocaine started in the 70s i mean the coca leaf has sort of thousands of years of you know sort of indigenous tribes would chew it to relieve pain but through a pretty simple industrial process you mix it with some chemicals you can turn it into the powder cocaine which is obviously incredibly addictive and stimulant wherever else and that hit new york and miami in the 70s but these guys who were industrializing that process in columbia became like billionaires overnight and escobar was one of them but the football shirt story I tell in the book is a bit later than that it's about to 2011-12 so Escobar was killed in 93 after that there was sort of you know power wars and lots of violence but things got a lot better one of the offshoots from all that was called the Envigado cartel or the Oficina de Envigado which was I think more involved in kind of money laundering and white collar stuff but the guy who was behind that also owned the football club Envigado he was murdered in 2006 his son owned the club and as a tribute to his dead father he put his face on the back of the shirt so this club were playing in the colombian premier league in 2011-12 so not ancient history with a dead gangster's face on the back and the club was then sanctioned it was on the it's called the clinton list the american government sanctioned list which means you can't do business with that club so it had no sponsors because your local soft drinks firm that would sponsor a football club is not touching this sanctioned entity so it's a blank a blank orange shirt and there's a dead gangster's face on the back and i went to a match there last year and saw a guy just a sort of you know so short stout guy maybe in his 50s with his dead gangster shirt and maybe he didn't even realize i mean you know that was just the shirt that season it's not bad though is it it's not a bad marketing you can see that happening i don't know if you've got the craze on there or craze on there that'd be a good west ham one maybe uh tapping into the history you see that's how that worked there's a there's in terms of that bit of it is there a thread running through when i was reading through and you get to these sort of case studies what did you learn about how it works it feels like there's a thread going through the book and again it's what i liked about the book is that it was taking this is the same idea that you hear day in day out from corporate sponsors who are you know talking about the premier league or looking at you know what what the value of a shirt deal is and all those things but there is something inherent in it yeah which is working i think what you're getting at is that i mean i think there's two types of sponsorship there's karlsberg sponsor liverpool for so many years because they want to sell beer to people and they would have made calculations about how much that's worth and calculated that the amount they pay to Liverpool is they're going to make more profit from beer as a result.

21:13Most sponsorships are like that I'd say. Some quite a lot of sponsorship is not really about that at all it's about tapping into the glamour and prestige of football in a way that is much harder to quantify and I think that's true of the sort of Middle Eastern countries owning clubs I think that's true of the dead gangster's face I think that's true of Gazprom. I think lots of sponsorship deals are more about the football is incredibly prestigious glamorous popular cool and so a lot of sponsorship and supporters about that i think rather than a sort of cost benefit analysis yeah

21:40Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:it's interesting because you sometimes hear again the conversation in the sponsorship industry is sometimes quite dismissive of football shirts as a you know it's well it's actually oh they're a bit old hat they're not very sophisticated and you hear people say well they're they're just a media buy okay or they're just about awareness as though well you know brand awareness wasn't valuable so you and the sponsorship industry doesn't like it because it wants i this is my reading of it is that it wants to appear more sophisticated than that in a world where you know we're talking about brand strategies and sponsorship and the shirt the football shirt one of the you know most famous bits of real estate but also it's sort of telling a story this is sponsorship and it's quite relatively simple story you you see it and we make connotations and it's there and you it's become more valuable as advertising so watching it live they're in the content rather than you know trying to fight their way into the ad breaks which is a you know an absolute bun fight so that bit of it and it's hard to measure as well i mean everywhere you know take manchester united and whatever it is like team viewer that slightly obscure german company that sponsored for a couple years and i think yeah got shareholders got annoyed they thought that I've paid for it but wherever I went in the world you know South Africa India I saw Team Viewer everywhere because of that yeah I don't think that's quite concentrated in a handful of clubs to be frank like I think there's a very sharp drop-off after probably Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United everywhere and you know how do you measure that you know if a Zimbabwean guy who drove my taxi in Cape Town was wearing a Manchester United shirt you know does that feed through to someone buying Team Viewer software I don't know maybe not well I think you get I mean the sponsorship measurement industry is let's call them optimistic yeah so you know they will put a number on that and so you know and obviously a man united we're all man united fans by the way they measure you know what yeah they've got how that is 10 billion fans or whatever exactly so but i think this again there's the sort of tangible intangible question and getting back to the root of your book is is the stories that come with it and i think it's incredibly powerful but more that you know less easy to put a number on but it talks to the sheer marketing power of that shirt you know and in whatever the story is it's just a blank vessel and whatever the story is that is putting whether it's you know colombian drug cartels or putin's political ambitions or i like the uh chapter about the prisoners of robin island can we do that one yeah that was fascinating and yeah i mean to be honest letting you look behind the curtain i was going to a wedding in south africa anyway and i thought right it'd be good to do a football show about south africa let's everything everything's copied joey yeah someone famous you know some people are like oh how did you do all this traveling and it's like well some of it was either stuff i did at the athletic or tacked onto stuff i was doing anyway yeah yeah so i was like let's i just want you know i thought you're going to say tax deductible then oh well that as well but let's go into that well that not that one anyway south africa yeah i sort of googled you know south africa football picked up this fantastic book about football and robin island which i knew nothing about like how you know i've read you know the long walk to freedom and i've you know i thought i knew a bit about south african history.

24:45But Robben Island, which of course is where the prisoners, the political prisoners against apartheid were sent, most famously Mandela, but lots of other people, including Jacob Zuma, who later became president of South Africa, all sorts of prominent black South Africans. When they first started going there in the 1960s, there was a lot of rivalry, a lot of factions, there was sort of communists and the ANC, and a lot of them didn't really get on with each other and had disputes from the mainland and whatever else. And anyway, what they really want, they were kept in terrible conditions, they really wanted to play football, and they kept asking their jailers, you know let's play football and at the time the apartheid government was coming under a lot of pressure from the international red cross and other governments so they sort of had to start giving a few concessions one of them they let them play football and it was like a bundle of rags tied together and then gradually it became a little bit more sophisticated they got a ball and then it became into this sort of league where there'd be teams and the teams would be different parties or the different political factions and the kits there the football shirts are basically the ones someone just went to a cape town sports shop with a and bought back a bag of kit and like you're the blue team you're the red team whatever and they had proper names named after sort of you know stuff in South African history and whatever else but gradually this became more and more formal and there was a sort of transfer system you'd have your cell number and you'd be given a contract and it became this really sort of fantastic thing and the really big change that happened is at one point it stopped being about political factions and people started transferring between teams across factions so the sort of communists and the ANC and whatever started working together more.

26:06And also some of the kind of white Afrikaner jailers started watching the games as a leisure activity because the quality was pretty good. So it also brought guards and sort of added this sort of humanity to this really horrible place. And lots of the people that were, I mean, Mandela himself wasn't because he was in solitary confinement, but Jacob Zuma and all these other Tokyo Sexwali, which is a very good name, it was another, a lot of these people have spoken about how important that was. And it brought the rival politicians together. And it meant that, you know in the 80s and when the apartheid regime was gradually crumbling there was a sort of political unity around mandela and around those first elections and people forget south africa's a bit of a basket case at the moment to be honest but looking back it's pretty astonishing that the transition happened without violence without very much violence which people all said before this is going to be you know civil war and part of that is to do with mandela himself and his own personality and de clerc who was the leader at the time but also the fact that this the anti-apartheid movement was relatively unified and people were talking to each other and football was a massive

27:03Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:part of that which i had no idea about no i didn't and and you know the the sort of mandela quote which is on is the sort of third slide of every sports marketing deck yeah i know it's a bit cliched but i had to get in there you know the sport has the power to change the world and i think it's sort of again it's interesting and we land on it but then again i came to the okay well i know what this chapter is going to be about i think oh no it's not about that so i you know i What do you think it was going to be about? Well, I thought it was going to, you know, you're sort of, as soon as you see Robben Island, Mandela, I think, okay, I know this story.

27:34Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:As you say, I think there's a route through this, but actually the detail of it is incredibly interesting. And some of it a bit sort of counterintuitive in terms of just the sophistication of the leagues and the way in which the game sort of is just played. But it's not just a kickabout. There's a whole structure to it, which I found is really fascinating and quite, you know, very endearing. Yeah. The World Cup was in 2010. He died in 2013. He was in basically very bad health by then. Throughout the 2000s, he became this, you know, the England team went there, Beckham and every big name footballer went to Mandela.

28:07And yeah, that's, I guess, another thing. But yeah, in the World Cup, 2010, it's a pretty amazing thing that happened. You know, FIFA long wanted to have a World Cup in Africa. It went off without a hitch. There's lots of fears about violence and whatever else. And it, you know, went off pretty much without a hitch.

28:19Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:What do you think about the sports washing question? Because I, again, I sort of wrestle with it a bit. and I see it applied to things and I wonder if it's there's it's you know become just a sort of a lazy way of trying to describe quite complicated yeah ambitions so I spoke there's a couple of chapters all about that I was keen for it not to be a book all about that I think you know other people have done that before okay well I suppose my big thought on sports washing that maybe developed over the course of writing this book is that the basic view of sports washing is that you're trying to wash the reputation of your country right you're Qatar you've done all sorts of human rights abuses you host the world cup and then everyone thinks qatar's a really fun place i think it's basically about state survival it's about qatar you're this tiny little place in between saudi arabia you're pretty suspicious of on one side iran and iraq and very unstable places on the other side you're qatar you're thinking right we've got loads of oil but gas sorry but are we going to exist in 50 years time and a way to exist in 50 years time and not be invaded is to number one host the biggest u.s former military base in the world which iran half-heartedly bombed the other week but it you know the missiles were intercepted and it wasn't really didn't really happen but also if you become the world sporting hub almost which qatar i mean i wouldn't say as much as london but in the sense that one country is most identified with sport above anything else qatar is a strong contender you know obviously we'll know about the world cup but the asian afc the equivalent of the euros but asian china was going to host it in 2023 but they had really strict covid rules at a few months warning qatar hosted it they're ready right And BA in Sport is also a central part of this as well.

29:52Yeah, the sort of triumvirate of PSG, BA in Sports and Qatar World Cup. Tennis tournaments, athletics tournaments, triathlons, everything. And I think, you know, it's worked in the sense that Qatar is probably more likely to exist in 2070 and not be invaded by its neighbours because of sport. And I think the Saudi Arabian question is, I think it's a similar thing. The oil is going to run out one day. I mean, Saudi Arabia is very different because Saudi Arabia is a country of 40 million people or something. It has a huge sort of restive youth population. You know, you could have like a revolution in Saudi Arabia.

30:23In Qatar, it's so tiny. And most of the people who live there are foreign that you can kind of keep a lid on things, I think. Whereas Saudi Arabia is kind of hard to control, I think.

30:30Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:And it's got more of it has a, you know, I've not been there. And but people who do and work there say there's a it's a proper football country. There is a proper football culture there. Absolutely. You know, the league, the domestic league is is servicing. and it's very easy to you know sit here and make judgments about it you know from Brighton I think judgment I think like you know criticizing you know the women's rights their gay rights their workers rights I think we should do that I don't I don't think that's sort of I think yeah I'm very happy to do that I think you've just got to sort of take it seriously I guess you've got to take these people seriously there's a really good book by James Montague called Engulfs where he it's about Saudi football he goes there and he talks to lots of Saudis and he's very critical of the human rights stuff I think yeah just sort of dismissing it out of his hand as like not a real football place, I think is a mistake.

31:15I mean, I think with Saudi, another thing which Saudi explained to me is that all dictatorships, which Saudi is, are fear revolution, right? They fear all these, basically young men tend to be the fervent of any revolution. They fear all these kind of young men who are a bit bored in Saudi Arabia because there's not enough work to do and they pay people to do nothing, that they overthrow the government for whatever reason, whether that be sort of religious extremism or a kind of liberal democratic revolution. If you give people football as a thing to go out and shout at each other about, it's almost like a safety valve.

31:41And dictatorships have used football in Serbia and Egypt and all sorts of countries as this sort of acceptable form of protest. And you're protesting against, you're shouting at rival fans rather than at the government. And even in China, there's been some toleration of sort of low level anti-government banners inside stadiums, which would never be accepted in a sort of town square. So if football can be this kind of release valve for protest.

32:05Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:It's quite interesting the way in which Saudi is sort of showing up differently, you know. and I've just come back from the open Portrush and Live Golf has been on, you know, the second conversation you have there. And you start in a position that's now four or five years old and where I think, you know, they wouldn't do it the way they did it again. And they're doing it differently in tennis and they're showing up, you know, and so the initial sort of thrust was they looked like outsiders and disruptors and, you know, you had Dan Rowan chasing, you know the piff guy around the golf course and and it all looked very shifty and whatever and now they've sort of they're trying to reframe that as a as a way of of just showing up in sport which i think is sort of interesting again i never quite know i think the sports washing question is interesting because it assumes as you said at the beginning a sort of it's almost like i always equate it to people think it's a bit like money laundering you know the image goes in dirty comes out clean but actually it's not as straightforward as that and it's messier and sometimes I think actually it acts like a sort of almost like a stadion naming right you know you say well because every everything is associated with you know human rights abuses gets tagged on to the question about Saudi so it sort of carries that story and makes that story as famous as the details yeah no another thing that really made me sort of second guess myself about sports washing or what it means was I went to a Qatar pre-tournament.

33:35I basically just wanted to go there and the athletic wanted me to go there to tour the stadiums before they were built. But there was an official event, an official tour. So I did, that was like one day out of six. But most of it, I just traveled around under my own steam. But I was at this event of the Al-Jubail Stadium, which was air-conditioned, this incredible place, air-conditioned, of course, built by people treated in terrible conditions who were, you know, a lot of them, particularly in the early 2010s, died from a heat exhaustion. And it's a complete scandal and it should never have happened.

34:01and coming from the UK and everyone talking about this in the UK, I went there. The guy said, the sort of Qatari guy, this was sort of a journalist talk. Everyone was from Asia, Africa, I don't know what countries, but yeah, the global south, you might say. I don't know if that's the right word these days, but I was the only kind of Westerner there. Put my hand up. I was like, I cannot, if I come back to my office in London, not having asked this question, my editors will kill me. I just said, you know, what about all the people who died making this stadium? You know, what's your response to that?

34:26And the guy was basically like shocked. He was sort of, you know, he was sort of mouthy with me. And then his sort of handler said to him, you know, no, no, we've got an answer to this. And he gave me the party line and he said that we've trained to labor laws and do so, which is all true. They have the labor laws are much better than they were and whatever else. And that was, you know, box ticked. I'd done that. I'd held them to account. But these guys around me, I'd been chatting to on the tour, you know, with one bloke from Nigeria. There's another guy from India. They were just like, what?

34:44You know, they were like baffled. You know, they were just kind of what? And they thought that the Qatar World Cup was really exciting. Because if you're Nigerian or if you're Indian, you've probably got a cousin that works in Qatar or you. and that it feels much closer to you than the new york does or the usa does where you probably can't get a visa to go on holiday and you certainly can't emigrate to work and for them the gulf and these places are kind of a place of opportunity and you know i don't necessarily agree with that i don't empathize with that i don't understand that on a personal level yeah but it just really made me think like wow you know the way we view this in in the uk is very different to how not just people who live in the gulf think about that but the you know

35:18Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:the billion africans or people yeah yeah yeah no it's a great point okay there's a let's switch because there's a we're in the middle of the women's euros and there's a there's a we need to talk about mary up shirt because i think again it's there's bits in that which i think are really that you got to i think are really interesting let's just let's talk about that in long live hannah hampton i'd say the you know england goalkeeper last night i think who needs who needs mary ups so yeah the mary ups a big hoo-ha obviously the hero of the euros you know i was there at wembley 2022 amazing england won play the tournament actually was she i don't know anyway the following england lost to spain in the world cup final mary ups was fantastic there's a big hoo-ha of that tournament because you could not buy an England women's goalkeeper shirt and she has this anecdote of her teammates niece or whatever little girl wants to follow her heroes and she can buy the outfield player shirt but she can't buy the goalkeeper shirt and this was sort of you know a bit of a scandal really and night were very embarrassed about it and they quickly made some and it became this sort of symbol of women's football not being taken seriously and it's kind of an incredibly sudden thing that women's football just being this massive global thing massively followed by fans big commercially as well big players earning lots of money big players you know i was watching the game in the pub and just you know these people are of the england team are kind of household names now you know leah williamson beth mead like people know who these people are in the way they didn't five years ago and obviously that's helped success massively helps with that but yeah the sort of rise of women's football i mean the story that i knew this story is like an anecdote but i researched it and read books about it and it's an incredible story of the ban on women's football like so the first world war the men went off to fight women started playing football in stadiums and people you know the kind of women who were around all the old men who weren't out to fight when all the kids went to watch them and it was really popular and in 1921 the dick kerr ladies which was a team at a factory in preston 50 000 people went to watch them at goodison park and then the fa banned it they they issued a ban they said the famous quote is not suitable for females and then women weren't allowed to play on fa affiliated pitches for 50 years and so you know it was basically a de facto ban on anything approaching serious rooms but you'd have a kick about in the park but you couldn't play at proper stadium the ban was lifted in 71 but pretty much every serious football country had had bands like that brazil literally at a time that brazil won three world cups they had a literal ban on women playing football in any capacity you couldn't have a kick about with your mates that was literally against the law and it's taken a long time for that to be for women's football to you know obviously there was women's football in the 80s and 90s and 2000s but I think it's only in the last 10 years that it's become you know a really big thing and I think it kind of mirrors you know women's rights more broadly that if you look at any objective statistics on you know women working or women you know outside the home and doing all sorts of important things it's completely taken off in every country obviously not always in a straight line and you look at the Taliban in Afghanistan and it can go backwards of course it can but I think you know women's football tracks that just move to gender equality more broadly and I think it's on a different I think just pointless comparing it to men's football you know it had this 50-year handicap so of course it's you know got less money behind it of course and like you know women are smaller and the game's got a different pace to it and it's you should it's got there's a whole the conversation is shifting and so Laura Youngson at IDA Sport you know again women's feet are different who knew yeah they need they need different boots and there's there's basmoffat at the well the women's running shoes have been in any sports shop for 30 years i didn't realize this this is a thing you go to any running shop there's a women's section football boots yeah people in the last world cup were playing in men's boots which are likely to give you terrible knee injuries it's crazy so yeah no absolutely and it's just that i mean there's there's a sort of and basmoffat is the other person i would i would throw in there so the well is you know again it's it's women's bodies You know, and it's it's sort of it's how the research and the data is is just almost entirely.

38:48Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:And I think, you know, the numbers are incredible about how what we think of as sports science is actually male sports science, which some of it might be applicable. But actually, it's a tiny fraction, which is of the research, which is women only. And so all of the assumptions within the data that is now built up and there's huge amounts of it is about men. so you start to make making decisions about health based on wonky you know data so there's a whole sort of question there say it's the 50 year problem um there was a good piece charlotte thompson did a good substat the other day she's at copper 90 and she did a thing on how women watch football at the euros in pubs you know so the pub experience so again the male the sort of same but different same or different question is just running through all of it and merrier sure i I think is a really nice, again, each chapter is a good tag into those sorts of issues.

39:42Unofficial Partner Podcast Host:I think, you know, it's fascinating. I think we can't talk about this without talking about betting. But, you know, there's a sort of question about, you know, the Premier League and where, how that betting has played a role. What's happened there, the relationship. Sometimes I look at it and think, OK, there is a normalisation of betting that's taken place maybe over 25 years. and one of the you know a huge fan of the premier league but one of the huge questions is that in terms of of actually what's happened and and our relationship and how central betting is societally now and how that links back to the shirts i think it's richard osmond said you know every every generation's vices are on a football shirt you know it's alcohol or betting or whatever it is so what do you think about that because sometimes i think i think yeah that i it's a huge you know there's the sort of unofficial betting crooked companies question yeah but there's also just the other one which is a much more mainstream conversation is about just the just it is normal now yeah so i did a lot of investigations when i was at athletic about the sham betting companies on using to chinese gamblers gambling's illegal in china this is some incredibly shady web of companies ranging from the isle of man to the philippines to vietnam often linked to pretty horrible organized crime and money laundering and human trafficking and really grim stuff directly linked to Premier League football shirts.