The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.

Here’s a city that can’t agree on a football club. Seville has two, and they’ve been at odds since a falling-out among directors in 1907 gave birth to Betis. Everyone repeats that Sevilla is the posh side and Betis the working-class one, but Adam Winkel suspects the clubs just like the story. Adam, a Spanish professor from North Carolina, found Betis the way outsiders usually find a team: through people. He spent a junior year abroad in the mid-90s, had friends from the province who followed Betis, and learned that knowing the weekend’s results gave him something to talk about. Almost thirty years later he plans his weekends around the club and watches matches with friends in a small Andalusian town over WhatsApp. This conversation covers a stadium rebuilt while the team plays elsewhere, a club that has fallen to the third division and still won the league, and a Champions League run that the whole country seems to enjoy. Betis supporters turn up in every away end in Spain because the migration of the 50s and 60s carried them to every industrial town. Adam, a former president of the Sport Literature Association, also asks a question I hadn’t considered. How does a novelist capture a match when the replay always does it better?

HELPFUL LINKS:

Adam Winkel

The Guardian on Rayo Vallecano's current crisis

Copa90 documentary about Seville and Betis (YouTube)

Collin Millar, The Frying Pan of Spain

The Assistant Professor of Football Rayo Vallecano episode

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If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

New British prime minister Andy Burnham has said that his morals have been shaped by Everton FC, the Catholic Church, and the labour party. Perhaps in that order. And indeed,  Burnham’s politics were forged on the terraces, long before Downing Street. Journalist Adrian Goldberg, author of Where’s the Money Gone? The Battle for the Soul of English Football, traces the line from an Everton-supporting kid who lived through Thatcher-era identity cards and police hostility toward fans, to the political advisor who discovered fan ownership at Northampton Town, to the minister who broke ranks at a Hillsborough memorial service to demand justice for Liverpool supporters. Goldberg argues that same communitarianism now shapes Burnham’s premiership, even as it collides with the Gulf-state money remaking Manchester. A conversation about what football taught a generation of working-class Britons about power, and what one of them is now doing with it.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR TODAY'S EPISODE:

Byline Times podcast, with Adrian Golderg

Adrain Goldberg, Where's the Money Gone? - book website

Alemannia Essen reporting on a streaker shocking children (in German)

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

West Ham are in the Championship, Millwall are back on the fixture list, and the Docker's Derby ended 2-2. Historian and lifelong Hammers fan Max Portman joins the show to ask whether relegation can be liberation, just as it was for 1860 Munich. He argues the club spent forty years chasing commercial success while the East End that produced it dispersed into Essex. What remains is the idea of a community strong enough to pull people back on Saturdays. That tension runs through everything we discuss: a relegation that feels oddly like relief now that David Sullivan is gone, a London Stadium that never feels quite real, and a crest that tells everyone what they already know. It even shapes a Millwall derby whose hatred Max dates to a 1972 testimonial. Along the way: Bobby Moore drinking in his grandparents' pub, why football is one of the last places where we still have to argue with people we disagree with - and FootyCon 2027.

LINKS:

Max Portman on LinkedIn, Bluesky

Sports in History podcast

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

What happens when a club loses its right to compete — not through relegation on the pitch, but through a financial trapdoor built by the very man who was supposed to save it?

This summer, 1860 Munich missed a license deadline a few million Euros - and was dropped a division not for how they played, but for how they were run. Fans have long argued that 1860 needs to be liberated from investor Hasan Ismaik. They finally got their wish - via bankruptcy and forced relegation. While the Ismaik- controlled entity is dead, the club underneath isn't. It's, in fact, suddenly free. 

What does it say about 1860 that their fans can look at demotion and feel hope instead of grief? And what does that say about German football more broadly — about clubs caught between fan ownership and outside capital, between the nonprofit "Verein" and the commercial entity riding inside it?

Claus, longtime 1860 supporter, club historian, James Joyce aficionado and our returning guide to all things Giesing, walks through the legal anatomy of the collapse — the KGaA, the debt, the broken renegotiation — and then makes the  case that a club freed from a bad marriage, even a division lower, might finally get to build something real.

TSV 1860 History Section 

TSV 1860 History section (Instagram)

4000 fans follow 1860 away to it's first 4th League game (Youtube)

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

... or: an Economist and a Tactics Nerd on what the last 6 weeks tell us about where the game is going. A spontaneous and incomplete post-final reaction.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

The recent CNN piece with me on why a draw "sometimes feels like a win"

Hörfehler Podcast, me on soccer in the U.S.

Florian Ederer, X

Dhruv Kapoor, X

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

The traditional The Assistant Professor of Football season round-up is back. I asked guests from this past year, and some from previous years whose clubs had remarkable seasons of one sort or the other how their clubs have fared, what moment stands out, and what song best embodies their club's vibe this past season. They are:

Medea Voegeli, professional historian and historian of FC Thun, from episode 76. Thun are the utterly sensational champions of Switzerland this year — after just having been promoted — so Medea has a lot of good vibes to share.

Then Paul Reidy, our English correspondent at Rayo Vallecano; that club portrait is episode 46. Rayo made it to the final of the best European club competition outside the Champions League, the Conference League. They lost against Crystal Palace, but this is their greatest success.

Another finalist: SC Freiburg, from episode 49. Freiburg made it to the Europa League final. They also lost against an English team, Aston Villa. Patrick Bucher from the club's history working group has a lot of stories to tell from his days at the final in Istanbul.

Next up is Alan McDougall, a historian at the University of Guelph in Canada who published a fabulous people's history of Liverpool and joined us in episode 72 — he's back to analyze a rather mixed season for them.

Then Stefan Wally, a political scientist and Austria Salzburg aficionado, on that club in the second Austrian league. They earned promotion last year and absolutely held their own — including a derby with the Red Bull farm team that tried to finish them off.

And last but not least: two teams who got relegated but also see some hope on the horizon, because their relegation has triggered — or at least coincides with — much-needed changes in ownership and leadership at their respective clubs: West Ham and 1860 Munich.

West Ham were relegated from the Premier League, as I'm sure you know. That is my club in England, and Alex — who is hard at work organizing supporters for change and for atmosphere at West Ham — gives us his take. And 1860… well, never a dull day there. The Jordanian investor withheld funds, the club was forced to drop out of the third German league, and it looks like that means — freedom, finally, for 1860. Claus Melchior from 1860's section on club history will give us the download.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE: 

Dubioza Kolektiv - I am from Bosnia, Take me to America (new music video, YouTube)

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

If you're old enough — what do you remember about the 1994 World Cup?

And if you're not, try to picture it. Soccer in the United States before MLS existed. Matches inside the Pontiac Silverdome, a domed football stadium in Michigan — humid, bizarre, and somehow full. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Record attendances that still haven't been broken. A tournament that, by most outside, European or Latin American accounts, had no business working as well as it did.

The standard story is that 1994 planted soccer in America. FIFA arrived, the world showed up, and a nation discovered the game. 

Tom McCabe thinks that story gets it almost exactly backwards. He is a historian, a filmmaker, and the co-host of the podcast An American Game, and he currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame’s London Center. His documentary Soccertown USA follows Kearny, New Jersey — a small industrial town that produced three players on the same 1994 national team: Tab Ramos, John Harkes, Tony Meola. His argument is simple and unsettling: the game was already there. It had been there for a century. 1994 didn't plant anything — it just showed up late to something that immigrant communities had built long before FIFA came looking for a market.

And that matters now, in the summer of 2026, because the World Cup is back, and so this is a look back b7t just as much a prep episode for what’s about to happen here. I’m torn about this World Cup. But if we're going to understand what this tournament means — who it's for, what it reveals, what it might actually leave behind — we need a better story from then to now. And that is what this conversation is about.

Music throughout this episode are huts from 1994, some of you will feel nostalgic: Ace of Base. Weezer. Beck. Roxette. All from that year. And Bruce Springsteen, whose Streets of Philadelphia uncovered a very different side of America, in that year as well. 

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

Soccertown USA (full documentary, Youtube)

An American Game (podcast)

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

Phil Harrison, a former Visiting Professor on soccer in Albania before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and me are giving our take on the song contest in Vienna this past Saturday. A very helpful visual breakdown of all points - jury and public - is HERE.

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

Eurovision has many things that soccer does - underdogs, spectacular collapses, bloc loyalties, political scores settled through performance, and a continent watching the same spectacle at the same time. And this year, the Eurovision Song Contest, a live-for-TV music contest with continent-wide public voting, is happening in Vienna, this coming weekend. Why there? Austria won it last year.

Here is a primer of, a short debate about, and a quiz about the Song Contest. And an outlook on how this year will go down. Plus many short clips of musical Eurovision highlights that came up in our conversation. 

All with 4 fans, of the contest and of football:

Andy Payne (England - West Ham United, chair of the fan advisory board)

Justus Römeth (Germany - Union St. Gilloise, BeUnion fanclub)

Julia Gollner (Austria - Sturm Graz, and orchestra harpist in Flensburg, Germany, and my sister;)

Songs from the episode: Athena - For Real; Lordi - Hard Rock Hallelujah; Måneskin - Zitti e Buoni; Abor & Tynna - Baller; Kalush Orchestra - Stefania; Alf Poier - Weil der Mensch Zählt; Måns Zelmerlöw and Petra Mede - Love Love, Peace Peace; Let 3 - Mama ŠČ; Cosmo - Tanzschein; J-Ax - Italia Starter Pack

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

Eurovision has many things that soccer does - underdogs, spectacular collapses, bloc loyalties, political scores settled through performance, and a continent watching the same spectacle at the same time. And this year, the Eurovision Song Contest, a live-for-TV music contest with continent-wide public voting, is happening in Vienna, this coming weekend. Why there? Austria won it last year.

Here is a primer of, a short debate about, and a quiz about the Song Contest. And an outlook on how this year will go down. Plus many short clips of musical Eurovision highlights that came up in our conversation. 

All with 4 fans, of the contest and of football:

Andy Payne (England - West Ham United, chair of the fan advisory board)

Justus Römeth (Germany - Union St. Gilloise, BeUnion fanclub)

Julia Gollner (Austria - Sturm Graz, and orchestra harpist in Flensburg, Germany, and my sister;)

Songs from the episode: Sandie Shaw - Puppet on a String; Katrina and The Waves - Love Shine a Light; Abba - Waterloo; Erika Vikman - Ich Komme; Guildo Horn - Guildo hat Euch lieb; Dana International - Viva la Diva; Lordi - Hard Rock Hallelujah; Windows95man - No Rules!

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

Babbel’s Intro to the Eurovision 

5-minute interval act at the 2016 contest (in Sweden) that explains, in humorous ways, how winning the Eurovision “works.” Spoiler: love love, peace peace.

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

If you enjoy this podcast and think that what I do fills a gap in soccer coverage that others would be interested in as well, please

• Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help. 
• Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/