On the face of it, my first game of football was a roaring success. Sunderland won 1-0 and six-year-old me watched the match without getting distracted. My dad had been clear that if the proceedings were of no interest to his son, he’d not be trying again for a few years. He needn’t have wasted his breath.
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My memories of that trip to Roker Park are blurred, a mixture of my own and those embedded in me through endless rewatches of that season’s end-of-year review on VHS. That I just about wore out the tape chronicling a season in which Sunderland got relegated should be evidence enough of how strongly this new obsession took hold.
I loved football instantly and, looking back now, I loved the sport’s embrace of something that leads me to this very piece today: numbers.
That was a time before digital scoreboards, and discovering the half-time scores in matches being played elsewhere required a little extra effort. On the back of the first matchday programme I ever held were that day’s selected games, each one assigned a letter. On the manually updated scoreboard were those same letters, the half-time scores appeared on little cards next to them. I couldn’t now tell you the other games happening that day, much less the half-time scores, but the memory of excitedly working out the various scorelines — then immediately dictating them to my dad — has never left me.
It was probably around then that he realised he’d created a monster. Never having taken the slightest notice of football before, now I was smitten.
Ten weeks after that home game in 1996 came a first away trip: Everton 1-3 Sunderland, Craig Russell and a Michael Bridges brace. A first defeat at Roker then followed a week later — another brace, this time from Wimbledon’s Efan Ekoku — and with it came the realisation that, actually, Sunderland might not go unbeaten until the end of time. No matter. I was in it now, hooked for the long haul.
Sunderland taking on Liverpool at Roker Park in 1997 (Gary M Prior/Allsport)
This new obsession manifested itself in strange ways. I’d go to my grandparents’ house armed with little more than a dice, a notepad and a pen, running through entirely made-up tournaments with glee (who knew there were so many 6-6 draws at the World Cup?)
I gorged on results on Ceefax, waiting patiently for the page to flick over to the next set of scores. An uncle of mine christened me ‘Statto’ on the way home from that Everton trip. I’m in my thirties now and it’s a nickname that still gets used today.
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Life events are remembered by their proximity to key footballing dates.
I’m not going to say I’d ever forget my anniversary, but it helps that Sunderland signed Jack Clarke on the day we got married (thankfully, the marriage has lasted longer than Clarke’s time on Wearside did). On at least one occasion where a break was needed at an old workplace, my future wife (first meeting: two days after a 3-1 home win over Stoke City) and I ‘entertained’ a colleague by her throwing out fixture dates from Sunderland’s 1996-97 season for me to respond with the opponents and result on that day and, more often than not, the goalscorers’ names, too.
Craig, if you’re reading this, I promise we don’t pass the time like that anymore. Please return our calls.
Football was an early love, numbers alongside it, then writing sidled into view at a point I can’t really remember. I’d always been a reader and at some stage, I turned my hand to jotting down my own stuff. Naturally, football was the first port of call. Efforts at converting it all into a serious venture were stilted; I opted instead for the security of an accountancy qualification, getting myself chartered and picking up scraps of scribbling where I could. In 2017, I wrote a book on Sunderland during my fleeting spare time (rather hurriedly, if I’m being honest) and that reignited the flame.
Since then I’ve sought to marry the two worlds as best I can. It helped that interest in the finances of the sport has never been greater. PSR’s march to join the likes of HT, FT, OG, xG and MOTD at the top of football’s abbreviation stakes continues untrammelled.
I found myself once more obsessed, this time with the money swirling around the game (though certainly not at every level of it), and set about building a database chock-full of financial facts and figures. I spotted a job opening at The Athletic, applied and, lo and behold, here I am, ready to serve as our first designated football finance writer.
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It’s a huge career shift for me. It’s not without risk. It’s also one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made.
It was in an article I read recently, lamenting London’s lack of a daily newspaper now the Evening Standard has moved to weekly publication, that I stumbled across the perfect anecdote for why — and I say this without ego or hubris — I could only have made this shift to a small array of publications.
In that piece, the author highlighted an instance of a single writer at a well-known daily in another British city filing “29 stories in two days for the paper’s website… a story every half an hour”. That struck me as both a crying shame and wholly unsurprising. The number of outlets that invest in both their writers and their audience is slim and thinning.
As a reader of The Athletic, you’ll already know they are a staunch member of that dwindling group. Joining the staff means joining a publication that commits time and effort to bringing you the best of modern sportswriting, with insight and a level of quality only achievable through giving writers the best resources available. It means being able to hook into a network of journalists who excel in their field. And it means being able to give you, the reader, the detail and nuance a hurriedly written sliver of clickbait could never hope to achieve.
When writing about the increasingly messy topic of money in football, there’s little scope for dumbing down. These are, at least in a sporting context, increasingly important matters.
Money, as Manchester United are showing with the actions of new co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, is an eternally relevant topic in football (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
On that note, this isn’t just an opportunity for me.
There’ll be a necessary adjustment period as we figure out what works in this new area of coverage and what doesn’t. That’s where you lot come in. If there’s something in the burgeoning field of football finance you can’t believe nobody is looking at in sufficient depth, tell us. If there’s anything — anything at all — that you think is a story in need of telling or investigating, let us know. You can do so in the comments below or you can send an email to cweatherspoon@theathletic.com.
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We start this week with deep dives on some of England’s largest clubs.
There is intrigue to be found across the board, from Manchester United’s much-publicised financial woes to Manchester City’s seemingly unstoppable growth, from Arsenal’s return to the game’s top table to Liverpool’s attempts, liked or loathed, to be as sustainable as possible. All of it will be covered in the coming days.
Beyond that, the world really is our oyster.
The ‘top’ clubs get plenty of eyeballs but in football, where money is involved, there are stories aplenty. Many of them are tales of woe, though not all. Brighton & Hove Albion and Brentford are the Premier League’s good news stories, but there are plenty more below and beyond. Nor will the focus fall solely on individual clubs. We’ll look at the lot, from FIFA on down, reaching into the often murky depths of football finance and pulling out the stories that matter, the ones that help shape the sport we all know and, for better or worse, still love today.
I can’t wait to get stuck into it. I hope you’ll enjoy the journey with me.
(Top photo: Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
