x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Football Ruined My Life

Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes, Paul Kobrak (and the late Patrick Barclay)

When Football Ruined My Life started back at the beginning of 2023 it was the new podcast about old football. In it, distinguished football journalist Patrick Barclay joined with Colin Shindler, author of the best selling Manchester United Ruined My Life, and the Super Agent Jon Holmes (think Gary Lineker, Peter Shilton, Tony Woodcock etc.) to talk about football as it used to be in the days before the invention of the Premier League. For over 80 weekly episodes, the podcast viewed those days

sports football

All Episodes

52:17

124. Those We Have Lost In 2025

Football Ruined My Life ·

2026/01/16

This week Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Jim White pay tribute to some of the players who died in 2025 plus two journalists and one referee. As most of our listeners are probably in their 60s and 70s, the deaths of players like Billy Bonds, John Robertson and perhaps above all Denis Law bring to the surface fears about our own mortality. If you loved the football and the footballers of the 1960s and 1970s, when our love for the game was sealed, you probably find, as we do, these deaths to be

en

50:12

123. Are Modern Refs Too Fussy?

Football Ruined My Life ·

2026/01/09

Anyone who watches The Big Match Revisited every Saturday morning on ITV4 will notice that referees in the 1970s and 1980s used to wave play on so much more often - which meant that the game flowed and wasn’t constantly hauled back for yet another free kick. You also pretty much had to amputate an opponent’s leg below the knee before you could be sent off. A sending off in the 1960s and 1970s was a big deal and the player was usually embarrassed and upset. Squads were of course much smaller so

en

48:32

122. Club Legends

Football Ruined My Life ·

2026/01/02

This week the Colin, Jon and Omid are talking about those players beloved by the fans but usually underrated by fans of other clubs. In other words, club legends - usually players who play for one club for thewhole of their career who do not appear to be tempted by a transfer to a club more likely to win trophies… and who certainly wouldn’t leave the club just for the sake of increasing even by a significant amount their weekly wage packet. Have such players entirely disappeared from our game

en

42:53

121. Postbag

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/12/26

Every year at this time we ensure that we have a postbag of your emails to spread joy and happiness among the growing Football Ruined My Life community. We encourage you to write to us every week and you do so in comforting numbers. Once again the tone is almost entirely positive with people wanting to contribute their own memories to the topic they’ve just listened to or correcting our very fallible memories. We look forward to these occasional episodes because it enables us to connect with our

en

50:30

120. Is the Game More Exciting Than it Was?

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/12/19

Following on from the last episode (the special on FIFA and their Peace Prize that was awarded to Donald Trump), this week Jon Holmes, Andy Hamilton and Colin Shindler ask themselves the question: “Is the game more or less exciting than it was when we first started watching football in the late 1950s/early 1960s?” It certainly seems to be more exciting to judge by the hysterical radio and television commentators and the ludicrous goal celebrations we have to suffer. Back in the day a goalscorer

en

31:55

119. Has FIFA Ruined My Football?

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/12/12

This is a shorter but very special edition of Football Ruined My Life. It was recorded three days after the sickening and humiliating farrago of nonsense which was the draw for the 2026 World Cup. It contained, of course, the sickening sight of a convicted felon being awarded a Peace Prize. The sheer inanity of the exercise made it entirely nonsensical. Within minutes of the draw starting, our producer Paul Kobrak, messaged Jon and Colin saying he was sickened by the spectacle that was unfolding

en

54:26

118. The One with Steve Coppell

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/12/05

In this episode Colin Shindler and Jim White are delighted to welcome one of the few Economics graduates to play for England and manage successfully in the Premier League. Steve Coppell’s potential career as aneconomist was somewhat overshadowed by 360 games as a right winger for Tranmere Rovers and Manchester United, despite being forced to retire at the age of 28 because of a bad knee injury. Incidentally he also had a subsequent career of over a thousand games as a highly successful manager of

en

39:25

117. The Players We Most Feared

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/11/28

The panel discuss the players they most feared because they were really good players and always played well against their own team... or players who were basically hatchet men who set out cold-bloodedly to injure their best player. When we talked about goalkeepers Pat Jennings came into the former category and you have to say nobody could dislike Pat who always seemed such a pleasant self-effacing bloke – unless you were trying to score past him. Don Revie’s Leeds United on the other hand were

en

41:59

116. Giant Killers

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/11/21

Ronnie Radford was a workaday midfielder playing for such legendary clubs as Worcester City, Bath City and Forest Green Rovers but in January 1972 he was playing for Hereford United in an FA Cup third round replay at Edgar Street on a quagmire of a pitch in front of a capacity crowd. With less than ten minutes to go and Newcastle comfortably 1-0 ahead Radford won a tackle in the Newcastle half and played a one-two. The return pass bobbled on the muddy surface but sat up nicely for Radford, and he

en

41:24

115. International Breaks

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/11/14

Now that England have already qualified for next year’s World Cup finals, this makes all the remaining matches in the group completely pointless from an England perspective. The November international break seems to have arrived 25 minutes after the October one. These tedious autumn and spring international breaks also extend the football season which now starts in the middle of the Test match series and ends as the following season’s Test match series begins. Colin Shindler, Jon Holmes and Jim

en

50:24

114. The Team of the 1960s

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/11/07

In this episode, Andy Hamilton, Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes resume their role as selectors as they choose the best team of the 1960s from the English Football League as it then was. That’s not one individual club or national side but a team composed of the outstanding players of that decade in some sort of logical formation that would bring out the best of them both as individuals and as team players. Players like Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews are ineligible as their greatest days were in the

en

53:12

113. Football in the 1960s

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/10/31

Colin Shindler tries to convince Jon Holmes and Jimmy Mulville that the 1960s was English football’s most glorious decade. Not just the world cup triumph of 1966, though that obviously features significantly at the heart of the decade. Secondary school was dark, depressing and alienating. Football by contrast was light, colourful and inclusive. All it asked of you was to enjoy playing and supporting your team. As a teenager in that decade, Colin had no wife or children to demand attention as

en

40:25

112. Short Lived Managers

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/10/24

We all remember Brian Clough’s infamous 44 days as manager of Leeds United, a fractious period of time which compared favourably with Liz Truss’s time as Prime Minister of the UK - and of course the lettuce that lasted longer than either of them. Colin Shindler recalls with ghastly clarity Steve Coppell’s 33 days in charge of the disaster that was Manchester City in 1996. Both these short-lived phenomena have been beaten very recently: not just by what last week with Ange Postecoglou’s departure

en

45:45

111. No Hopers

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/10/17

On the first day of every season nearly all football supporters experience the same surge of pride and expectation. When they get to the ground it looks gleaming. The grass is green and the white lines stand out in marked contrast inviting the arrival of our heroes and stimulating thoughts of promotion and championships and European football. This emotion for most supporters doesn’t even last ninety minutes as the wretched disappointment of a 2-0 home defeat brings them back to the grim reality

en

43:36

110. Who Runs The Club?

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/10/10

It’s an increasingly pertinent question in football. In the days of Shankly, Clough and Ferguson it was blindingly obvious who ran their clubs. But as the manager’s role has been split between the Head Coach and the Director of Football, that vision of total authority has become increasingly blurred. The Head Coach might pick the team on Saturday afternoon (or possibly Friday night or Sunday lunchtime) but bizarrely, and to his utter frustration, he might not have bought any of the players he is

en

42:29

109. Team of the 70s

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/10/03

Following on from the previous edition, Colin Shindler, Jim White and Jon Holmes set themselves the task of choosing from the English Football League as it then was, a team of the 1970s. That’s not one individual club or national side, but a team composed of the outstanding players of that decade in some sort of logical formation that would bring out the best of them both as individuals and as team players. It is with evident relief that all our regular listeners will realise that we can start

en

43:40

108. The One From The 70s… with Jon Spurling

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/09/26

Not unusually for this podcast, we look back – with quite some affection – to the 1970s. Many of our listeners will also no doubt remember the decade through a haze of nostalgic introspection… but of course it was also a tumultuous ten years that not only laid many of the foundation stones for the modern game, but also witnessed the English national team twice failing to qualify for the World Cup Finals after their heroics in the competition in 1970. Bringing a younger, but no less well-informed

en

40:17

107. Falls From Grace

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/09/19

Jim White was astonished to find that Andy Carroll is now turning out on Saturday afternoons to play in the sixth tier of English for Dagenham & Redbridge. So it’s Jim who leads the discussion (with Colin Shindler and Jon Holmes) of players who once strode purposefully at the summit of the game but ended their careers in far less salubrious circumstances. BobbyMoore finished his playing career in the Danish Third Division and George Best turned out for Dunstable Town when he was good enough to

en

47:03

106. The One With Daniel Gray

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/09/12

This week Jon Holmes and Colin Shindler are joined by the author Daniel Gray to discuss his 2013 book “Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters” – a fascinating travel book about England as seen through the less glamorous clubs of English football and the communities that support them. It’s time that clubs like Crewe and Chester and Bradford City were given their due air time and Football Ruined My Life is glad to accord it to them. Daniel proves a witty and poetic chronicler of the distant outreaches of

en

44:35

105. Football in 2050

Football Ruined My Life ·

2025/09/05

Jon Holmes, Jim White and Colin Shindler speculate (if present trends continue) about what football will look like in the year 2050 when it is very likely that none of them will be around to feel embarrassed by how badly they got things wrong. Colin mischievously teases Jon to consider what will have happened to Leicester City in 25 years time. Will there still be a Premier League such as we currently know it or indeed will there still be a Leicester City or might it be swallowed up in the East

en

127 results

Similar Podcasts

Keeping Karlsson Fantasy Hockey Podcast

Elan Dubrofsky and Brian Kom

Daily Fantasy Sports by Ship It Nation

Ship It Nation

Fantasy Football Today

CBS Sports, Fantasy Football, FFT, NFL,...

Bring The Pain

Heat00veride

ESPN SportsCenter Update

ESPN