It's been one hell of a year
The Football Weekend's 2025, wrapped.
Please excuse the navel-gazing, but a lot of new readers have joined up over the last month or two and they might have missed out on past exploits!
It’s been an eventful year, starting with a new series that launched in January…
CATHEDRALS
On-the-ground reports from the world’s great stadiums.
It all began on Merseyside with a visit to Goodison Park, which I was desperate to get to before the place closed for good. Everton ultimately decided to keep it alive as a venue for the women’s team, but it will be difficult to replicate the brilliant atmosphere I found that day in the Gwladys Street End:
On both occasions, I had to crane my head around a royal blue pillar — and the cresting waves of others’ heads and limbs in front of me — to see what happened. From a seat deep in the stand behind the goal, under the overhang of the second tier above, you could still just about see events at the far end — where Everton were banging in their first-half goals — if you found that sweet spot, that letterbox window through the madness. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
This is life in the back of the Gwladys Street, the beating heart of Everton Football Club’s home support. And it’s life at Goodison Park, their idiosyncratic base since 1892 where around 10 percent of the seats have Obstructed Views, and where time is running out.
You can check the story out in full here:
Then it was over to Anfield across town for a Champions League night under the lights. While speaking with people in and around Liverpool, I learned about the history of this football temple and found a few folks asking whether its famous atmosphere had changed.
“What is really interesting about it is the BBC guy who’s fronting the report,” said John Williams, author of Red Men: Liverpool Football Club, The Biography. “He’s talking about the crowd like he would talk about some tribe in the South Pacific. As if they’re completely weird and strange, and somehow completely non-English. And in a way, he’s kind of right. Because the Liverpool crowd, particularly — more than Everton, I think — has a deep-seated Irish oral culture at the heart of it. It wasn’t very English [at the time] to sing songs collectively like this.”
You can check this one out in full here:
And in the spring, I got out to Bologna to visit the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara, which turned out to be a fascinating layer cake of contradictions:
“Bologna is basically a left-wing city,” [Corriere di Bologna editor-in-chief Olivio] Romanini said. “For years, it was the capital of the Italian left. It is called, ‘The Fat, the Learned, and the Red,’ and therefore it’s a contradiction that its stadium is of fascist origin.”
If you’d like to help make more of this on-the-ground reporting happen, you can become a member of The Football Weekend for the price of a pint each month.
That’ll also get you full access to the archive of …
FEATURES
The best of The Football Weekend’s magazine-style journalism.
Like a conversation with Clint Dempsey back in January.
I’d interviewed him for a GQ story I did on Christian Pulisic, but I had some great material left over on Dempsey’s own career and American players in Europe. Get the full Q&A here:
There was also a chat with Liverpool and Real Madrid legend Steve McManaman about his time with the Galácticos:
You went to Madrid before the Galáctico era. Was there a moment when you looked around the dressing room and realized things had changed, that the galaxy of stars had arrived? Did it feel different?
No, you know what? Weirdly enough, it only felt different right at the end, when David [Beckham] came in…
You can get the full Q&A here:
And there were a few more on-the-ground reports in the FEATURES section…
And then there was…
THE PODCAST
We were lucky to have some of the big names and great minds of world football on the show this year to preview a massive match from the weekend to come.
Legendary commentator Clive Tyldesley helped us ring in this 2025/26 season. His co-commentator on CBS/Paramount+, former England goalkeeper Rob Green, came by days before he called the Champions League final. The Athletic’s one and only Carl Anka tried to diagnose the problems plaguing Manchester United ahead of the Manchester derby. ESPN’s Bundesliga commentators Derek Rae and Stewart Robson previewed Germany’s biggest game and offered a look behind the curtain at how they record the commentary for the EA Sports FC games.
The longtime Premier League fullback and pundit Stephen Warnock clocked in ahead of a heavyweight clash between Liverpool and Manchester City. Storied Spanish football scribe Graham Hunter helped us take stock of the Madrid derby. The brilliant Laurence McKenna talked all things Liverpool ahead of their date with Newcastle United in the League Cup final. And ahead of the Championship playoff final, BBC commentator (and star of Sunderland ‘Til I Die) Nick Barnes came by to talk what Premier League promotion would mean for Sunderland — and what the Netflix series meant, too.
Stadium connoisseur and ESPN/NBC commentator Jon Champion came by ahead of calling the FA Cup final. Arseblog, Andrew Mangan, came on ahead of Arsenal’s early season crunch clash with Liverpool. Longtime USMNT and Premier League goalkeeper Brad Friedel dropped in to talk about all of that and his time in Istanbul with Galatasaray ahead of their explosive derby with Fenerbahçe.
And we kicked off the World Cup preview coverage with Felipe Cardenas, Maher Mezahi, and Jonathan Wilson.
That last one got into some Political Football, and we didn’t hold back on that elsewhere, either.
No words were minced about the Club World Cup, the FIFA World Cup draw, Juventus’s poor White House decisions, Chelsea’s shamelessness, or the ugly side of the Old Firm.
A few matches worth your time this weekend…
Tottenham Hotspur vs Liverpool
RB Leipzig vs Bayer Leverkusen
Awesome work!
Great year wrap up. Looking forward to the next Football Weekend, football weekend