The summer of 1966 was a special one for English soccer. England won their first and only major trophy after beating West Germany 4-2 in the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, while one of the greatest English TV presenters of all time — James Richardson — was born in Bristol, England.
Born on May 29, 1966, Richardson spent most of his childhood in England but also enjoyed brief spells in the Middle East. “I like living abroad,” stated Richardson in an exclusive World Soccer Talk interview. “I was born in Bristol and lived near London until I was about seven before my folks moved to Lebanon. I lived in Lebanon for a little bit and then returned to England before moving back to the Middle East and living there at 10 or 11 years old. I really grew up with this idea of there being a bigger world out there, one with better weather, and thinking, ‘How nice would it be to go and spend time there as an adult?’ I’ve got three brothers and sisters who’ve all gone and lived abroad as well. Some of them grew up in India, one of them’s now an American citizen, one was in Australia for ages and is now in France… I mean, we’re all over the world. I’m very, very happy to go to a new place and learn a new language anytime the opportunity arises. I’m pretty flexible, but I would love to go and live in Japan… let’s make that happen.”
After purchasing a satellite dish in 1989, Richardson started watching Serie A — the best league in the world at the time — and developed an appreciation for Italian soccer that had never quite registered with him for his native English soccer. Shortly after, he started dating a girl from Rome. And while they didn’t end up tying the knot, this relationship would prove instrumental for Richardson, who started following Roma — an affinity that has lasted for three decades — and learning Italian, eventually becoming fluent. This, combined with a fledgling experience in TV production, would prompt him to be hired by British free-to-air public broadcast television Channel 4 as a producer for a new program: Football Italia. Richardson moved from England to Italy in 1992, where he would spend the next decade.
Initially hired to be a hands-on producer to help out Paul Gascoigne, the most talented English player at the time who had recently left Tottenham Hotspur for Lazio, Richardson was forced to step into the spotlight when Gascoigne began to frequently miss his appointments. He went from an unknown producer to one of England’s most beloved TV presenters almost overnight. Whether sipping an affogato outside a café while analyzing the latest in Italian football, or chatting with Serie A stars and managers, Richardson was able to connect with millions of British viewers and bring them to the front and center of Italian soccer. He returned to London in 2002, where he has stayed ever since, presenting Eurosport’s live coverage of Serie A before anchoring Bravo TV’s Football Italia Live and the reboot of Gazzetta Football Italia. But by the end of 2006, Serie A had lost its glamour following the Calciopoli scandal as well as the rise in popularity of the Premier League, prompting Richardson’s legendary Football Italia chapter to come to an end after 14 years.
Can Serie A ever return to the zenith of world soccer like it was a quarter-century ago? Richardson isn’t optimistic. “I don’t think winning the UEFA Champions League will make that much of a difference for Serie A clubs. José Mourinho did it with Inter, and it didn’t move the needle in any way. Inter could have done it a couple of seasons ago vs. Manchester City… they were really close to winning that final. But I think those teams were exceptions. The overall financial health of the league is improving massively, and it really has to begin with that. Thankfully, that’s happening, and that’s the fruit of these incredible levels of foreign ownership of Italian clubs. Pretty much half of Serie A is now in the hands of North American owners, be they Canadian or American, which has brought an entirely new mentality to the way these clubs are being run. It was a bit of a freak show, not just the clubs themselves, but also the way the league was set up. It was a little ‘casereccio,’ or homemade, and I think there’s no way that anybody can compete with the Premier League.”
“The Premier League is a tremendous league. It’s enormously wealthy, which means that it can acquire all the best players, and it also has a kind of historical resonance that no other league can match. It’s the home of football, and therefore, your Manchester Uniteds, your Liverpools, your Nottingham Forests have a cachet that, even though Juventus and Milan are also amazing teams, there’s something special about English football. Can Serie A ever compete with that again? Well, everything’s cyclical, so yes, I think they can, but you would need the Premier League to hit a bit of a speed bump, because the way they are at the moment is just unprecedented… probably only the NFL in world sport can come close to the kind of turnover that the Premier League has. Certainly, the other football leagues, the other countries’ football leagues, are left so far behind in terms of the international broadcast rights that the Premier League makes, because when people around the world watch foreign football, it’s almost always the Premier League that they watch. There’ll be the odd exception, like El Clásico, but it’s the Premier League occupying second place for all those other viewers from all those other countries. Right now, they’re pretty unassailable, but as I say, everything’s cyclical. Maybe, when I’m an even older man, we’ll see Serie A back at the top of the pile.”
Despite having to find a broader niche than simply Italian soccer, Richardson has been able to land on his feet and stake his claim as one of the top presenters in the game alongside the likes of Dave Johnson and Kate Scott. After co-presenting Setanta Sports’ The Friday Football Show and Football Matters with Rebecca Lowe between 2007 and 2009 and working with BBC’s Late Kick Off for the South West region, Richardson returned to Italian soccer coverage with ESPN. He then worked at BT Sport (now TNT Sports) from 2013 to 2017, where he hosted live Serie A matches and the Sunday night round-up show European Football Show, as well as The UEFA Champions League Goals Show, while he also co-hosted The Fantasy Premier League Show by Premier League Productions.
Today, Richardson spends most of his time hosting The Totally Football Show podcast, masterfully weaving between a plethora of topics and chatting with seasoned journalists like James Horncastle, Raphael Honigstein, Julien Laurens, and Alvaro Romeo. But while he’s made his reputation in soccer — traveling to the United States last summer as part of the joint DAZN/5 presentation team for their coverage of the first-ever 32-team FIFA Club World Cup — he’s also branched out into other, lesser-known sports like cycling, darts, sumo, and niche competitions such as The World’s Strongest Man and The Great Model Railway Challenge.
“I don’t really write too much. The main thing I do is my podcast, which I do four times a week. We have a European soccer show, and then a preview and a review show on the Premier League, and then a show where we do retro stuff or anything that we find not tied to that week’s news. It’s called The Totally Football Show — silly title, but there you go — do give it a listen if you never have. I’m recording four times a week and watching all the soccer that goes around it. It’s so much soccer that it takes up most of my time, and then I’ve also got other stuff which happens at different points, like going away to do World’s Strongest Man for the last 15 years, and then other stuff like hosting a sumo tournament at the Royal Albert Hall in London. I’m pretty much doing the podcast and then random other stuff, or if somebody employs me to go on TV, like I did for DAZN with the FIFA Club World Cup, then that’s super good. But mostly, at the moment, I’m a podcaster.”
At nearly 60 years of age, James Richardson has spent the past three decades emerging as one of the top sports presenters in the entire industry, and while he’s done just about everything there is to do, he’s shown no signs whatsoever of easing off the pedal.
