From the France football captain at the 1930 World Cup who later became one of the country’s most despicable traitors to the Sheffield Wednesday top scorer who acted with Charlie Chaplin, to ‘Manager Idol’ and how primetime TV inspired one of the sport’s most shambolic appointments, Forgotten Stories of Football spans more than 100 years of sporting history from across the footballing planet, says The Guardian.
The first episode of Forgotten Stories of Football, launched yesterday (Wednesday 13 May), explores farce and fascism at the 1936 Olympics. It describes how Italy's gold medal at the Games was won whilst the tournament was overshadowed by controversial victories and Nazi bullying.
The series also includes the resonant story of how it took a young England defender’s sudden death to convince a generation of young people to embrace the fight against a previous era’s killer epidemic.
Similar to the Guardian’s Audio Long Reads podcast, Forgotten Stories of Football draws upon popular written stories from an original Guardian series and will be narrated by a range of voices.
Christian Bennett, executive editor for multimedia journalism, Guardian News & Media, said: “Our talented audio team has produced another world-class podcast series. Forgotten Stories of Football is a fantastic addition to our podcast offering, bringing great Guardian journalism to listeners with a real focus on storytelling. We have a highly engaged and loyal podcast audience, particularly around football, which this podcast will help to tap into at a time when people around the world will be missing sporting events.”
New episodes of Forgotten Stories of Football will be released weekly across the coming months and can be listened to on theguardian.com/audio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast etc.
The series is written by Guardian journalists with additional reporting provided by Rob Smyth, studio production is by Polly Thomas, Simon Barnard and Eva Krysiak, sound design by Eloise Whitmore, and original music by Mike Payne. The series is overseen by Christian Bennett, the Guardian’s executive editor for multimedia journalism.
