This week the panel (and their producer) are bitterly divided on the contentious issue of the Nations League and its value compared to the old Home Internationals when England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland played with themselves. One side sees a desperation of the television companies and UEFA to ensure that no summer passes without an international tournament, leading to player burnout and spectator indifference. The other side sees a sensible arrangement that abolishes pointless friendlies, gives every match a purpose and ensures that the weaker sides play each other and are not just cannon fodder for the big boys. Fortunately, remote recording ensures that violence amongst members of the panel, though seemingly imminent, never requires police intervention. 

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Twelve yards away, the keeper can’t move off his line until the ball is struck. How does anyone ever miss a penalty? Well, as we all know they do miss and frequently it’s crucial in a match.  So it can be too for the award in the first place of a penalty for handball with no intent to handle by the defender and for fouls when the forward has cleverly tripped himself up but made it look like it’s a deliberate foul. Plenty for Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Patrick Barclay to get their collective teeth into here.

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A change of pace for Football Ruined My Life this week. In this podcast we’re looking back at football players and managers who died during 2024.  Clearly we can only deal with a handful of the many who left us last year but what follows is the choice of Jon Holmes, Paddy Barclay and Colin Shindler as they discuss the lives and careers of the football men who meant something to them and whom they wish to honour in this brief tribute. Not so much a eulogy but a celebration… so still pretty upbeat.

That said, the episode ends with additional memories - of Denis Law, who died after the original episode was recorded and for whom we could not wait for an Obituary programme looking back at 2025.

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The prolific goal-scoring winger Ian Storey-Moore turns 80 on the day this episode was published... and Football Ruined My Life has chosen to mark the occasion by giving him the greatest present a footballer of the 1960s and 1970s could possibly want - a guest appearance on the podcast with Paddy Barclay, Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler. A star forward in the nearly great Nottingham Forest team of the late 1960s but forced into early retirement by a bad injury shortly after his controversial transfer to Manchester United, Ian stayed in the game as a scout, particularly with Martin O'Neill during his time as manager of Aston Villa. His views on football then and now are fascinating and will entertain you as if you were actually at his birthday party.

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Real centre forwards were old fashioned battering rams like Nat Lofthouse, Ted Drake of the great Arsenal side of the 1930s and Bobby Smith the rampaging leader of the Spurs double winning attack.  As football has become more skilful, they have largely been replaced by False 9s as they are now called or deep-lying centre forwards as they were in the days of Don Revie and the Hungarian Hidegkuti.  Jon Holmes, Patrick Barclay and Jon Holmes panel discuss the impact on the game of the change and surprisingly all three of them retain a nostalgic love of the centre forwards of their youth.

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He’s a well-known and much liked voice on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth programme as well as Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.  But Michael Rosen is this week’s guest on Football Ruined My Life because he is a genuine Gooner - as visitors to the Emirates Stadium can see when they observe him depicted on the famous mural next to his late son Eddie and Gunnersaurus. First introduced to the game by his father, a fan from the Herbert Chapman glory days, Michael has been a fixture at Highbury and the Emirates since the 1950s and his reminiscences are conveyed in the podcast with his trademark humour and

insight.

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As a New Year’s gift, the panel come bearing the bulging postbag containing our listeners’ emails.  Once again we can report a high standard of literacy and a comfortingly accurate recall

of matches and teams from the dim recesses of all our childhoods.  One correspondent, the self-styled King Arthur, a Liverpudlian now living in Malibu California, has written enough emails to fill three editions but he is joined as ever by the reminiscences of our widely diverse (though principally over the age of fifty) regular listeners and correspondents to whet the appetite for

what is to come in 2025.

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Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Paddy Barclay wish all our listeners a very merry Christmas and we do so by recalling Christmas time matches from long ago.  With far less choice on offer, both on television and on the dining room table, football at Christmas provided a fabulous feast of entertainment, the climax to which came on Boxing Day in 1963 when to everyone’s astonishment a record number of 66 goals were scored in the 10 First Division fixtures alone.  Has the mass globalisation of the modern game in recent years had any impact on the distinctive Englishness of Yuletide matches?

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Colin Shindler, Patrick Barclay and Jon Holmes examine the value of utility players – the player who could fill in anywhere on the pitch from right back to outside left.  There is a marked tendency by current managers to favour specialisation over utility yet we all remember, usually with affection, those players who could “do a job” anywhere on the pitch – the perfect player to bring on in the days when there was only one substitute.  The panel pays tribute to the Paul Madeleys of the game and explore the reasons for their gradual disappearance from the game.

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Colin Shindler, Paddy Barclay and Jon Holmes discuss the phenomenon of Brits Abroad, those British footballers who made the transition to the sun, sangria and shenanigans of playing for foreign teams.  Jon of course became a one-man Lunn PolyTravel Agency for his clients in the 1980s but the phenomenon of British footballers travelling to foreign climes began early in the postwar years with the Bogata bandits.  With the exception of John Charles and Gerry Hitchens, English exports to European clubs in the 1950s and 1960s were generally not a great success.  But after Kevin Keegan went to SV Hamburg in 1977 it all began to change until the arrival of the Premier League’s wealth reversed the direction of the flow of traffic across the Channel.

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