The best 5 podcast about football

According to some statistics, podcasts are saving radio ratings. Thanks to these on-demand chatter, the radio audience survives, and with it, the culture of listening. Over the years they have been born of all kinds and kinds, each with its own audience - we also have one on nss, in collaboration with StockX - and there are many for football fans too. Not only that, as many publishers do, the re-proposition in podcasts of radio broadcasts, but real containers of football information.

Football podcasts are divided following every possible niche of the sport: those who talk about tactics, those who talk about the matches of the past, and those who even broadcast only news of the football market or supporters' choirs. It is a different, more colloquial and less generalist method of information, made specifically to create a relationship between speaker(s) and listener. Clubs are also producing them. In England it is very popular the one about Liverpool, while in Italy, Inter Podcast has entered the ranking of the most listened podcasts. Among the many football content that can be heard on the various platforms used - such as iPodcast or Spotify - nss has selected five to pay attention to.    

Fenomeno - La Riserva 

Fenomeno is a group of speakers composed for the most part of members of the editorial staff of the website L'Ultimo Uomo, to which other guests are also added. Among the different podcasts that Fenomeno records - all produced in collaboration with Spreaker, a podcasting platform - is La Riserva, which in simple terms, is a program in which we talk about football in a fun and original way. It is conducted by Daniele Manusia, Emanuele Atturo and Simone Conte, and with a markedly Roman stamp, the main sporting events of Italian football are analyzed. The episodes almost all last more than an hour - some even two - and, despite being conducted in a friendly tone, there is also room to analyze thornier and more sensitive issues concerning football. For example, in one of the last episodes, there were some very interesting insights into the Ibrahimovic-Lukaku struggle. 

Stefano Borghi - Cronache dei '90

Stefano Borghi has become in recent years one of the most popular commentators in Italy. Born as the voice of the South American league and then specialized in La Liga, since the start of DAZN he is also one of the commentators of the Italian championship. His oratory art and a selected lexicon are also the protagonists of his YouTube channel, opened after the podcast platform storielibere.fm had organized with him a cycle of recordings on Nineties football, called Chronicles of the Nineties (we had talked about it here). Over time, the project became stable and several episodes followed: nigeria at USA 94, gullit's life, De Rossi's life. The episodes are just over an hour long and are characterized by borghi's refined lexicon, which includes, in his football stories, also looks at the historical context of the period we are talking about. In the first season there was talk of football in the Nineties, while in the second season, always in the same historical context, the focus is on the plays of the individual champions, together with Billy Costacurta.

Il Calcio Inglese - Il Calcio Inglese 

The Premier League is the most followed football tournament in the world and, even in Italy, it is full of its followers. For them there is a dedicated podcast, and it is curated by Andrea Pettinello, founder of Il Calcio Inglese - which is also the title of the podcast. Precisely, in a variable duration (there are 12, 50, and 30 minutes), in each episode there is a story or a game of English football told through what are the peculiarities of British football: the heritage, the context, the spectacularness of the great champions on the pitch. Pettinello is the host, but various editors of the homonymous site also intervene in the episodes, and the traces of the articles published on the homonymous site are followed, but every now and then the voices of some important guests appear, such as Paolo Condò, called to deepen some themes of English football. It is a light conduction, with a colloquial lexicon and an often didascalic approach: for those who really love British football, it is a good time to deepen interesting stories. 

Tifo Football - The Tifo Football Pdocast 

Those who are passionate about football will have happened, at least once, to watch (even by chance) on YouTube a video of the Tifo Football team. It is those videos with a yellow background in which, through tactical drawings and whiteboards, the tactics of the teams are explained (in English) or deepens with an orderly and lucid storytelling some situations of the field. For some years now, Tifo, in collaboration with the English magazine The Athletic, has opened a podcast conducted by Joe Devine in which he analyzes the main sporting situations of the moment, and with the presence, at times, of important guests. In addition to various magazine signature hosts (such as James Horncastle or Carl Anka), several players or characters interviewed also participated to delve into stories that, as they are defined on the program's caption, are tactical, historical, and geopolitical. Unlike the YouTube channel, tifo's podcast also goes beyond the football played, with the evolution of the club brand, or the football market. 

Peter Crouch - The Peter Crouch Podcast 

There are many English-language podcasts that don't talk about football, but of all, one really original is that of Peter Crouch. He inaugurated it in 2018 after he retired and, indeed, it was not his initiative, but a proposal from the BBC - the broadcaster that broadcasts it - which after some radio shows also commissioned him an on-demand space of his own. The former England striker is very shameless in his comments: he analyzes Premier League episodes along with two English BBC journalists, Chris Stark and Tom Fordyce, and important guests - former footballers or coaches - often also appear. Crouch's desecralizing tone and (surprising) showman savoir faire won millions of listeners, so much so that in 2019, the episodes peaked at 12 million listeners.