The iconic James Richardson speaks to GIFN in exclusive interview | OneFootball

Once upon a time, neither the Premier League nor LaLiga was the top league in world football. Instead, it was Serie A that ruled the beautiful game. And it’s precisely why, despite spending the bulk of his childhood in England, James Richardson fell in love with Italian football before he ever fancied the English game.

While Richardson was born in Bristol, he also enjoyed brief stints in Middle Eastern countries during his childhood. “We went to the Middle East because of my dad’s job,” Richardson stated in an exclusive Get Italian Football News interview.

“I was 7 when I went to Lebanon, and I loved being in such a beautiful country with a lot of French influence, amazing Roman remains…you could go skiing in the winter, you could go water skiing in the summer.”

“We had to leave in a hurry because the Civil War broke out. I’d go to school in England and then go to Kuwait for holidays, where it was hot and we could go to the beach and enjoy that expatriate lifestyle. It was fun, but I wouldn’t have any kind of particularly mature takes on what living in those countries were like. I just liked it because it meant I wasn’t at school, and the weather was nice.”

Richardson grew up in a country where England was the continent’s pariah, with their club teams banned from UEFA competition and their national team struggling to make an impact on the biggest stage. It’s precisely why he decided to start following Italian football after purchasing a satellite disk in 1989.

Soon, he started dating a girl from Rome, who, despite not marrying him, convinced Richardson to start learning (and become fluent in Italian) and supporting Roma. Three decades later, he still supports the Giallorossi.

This newfound fluency in Italian, as well as his brief experience in TV production, would eventually lead to Channel 4 hiring him to be a producer on a brand-new program called Football Italia. Richardson left England and started a new life in Italy, where he would spend a decade.

Initially hired to play an assistant role to English football icon Paul Gascoigne, who had swapped Tottenham Hotspur for Lazio that same summer, Richardson was forced to step up and become the posterboy of Channel 4’s Italian football coverage. Richardson lived in Italy from 1992 to 2002, presenting Football Italia’s two weekend shows, Gazzetta Football Italia and La Partita and Mezzanotte, before returning to London.

Richardson presented Eurosport live coverage of Serie A before anchoring Bravo TV’s Football Italia Live and the reboot of Gazzetta Football Italia. But by the time 2007 rolled around, Richardson was forced to say goodbye to Football Italia, with the Premier League surpassing Serie A in popularity thanks to a newfound affluence and the controversy brought about by the Calciopoli scandal. Despite having to find a new niche, Richardson has nevertheless landed on his feet and established himself as one of the top voices in the game alongside the likes of Dave Johnson, Taylor Twellman and Herculez Gomez.

“Even before the 2002/03 UEFA Champions League Final between Juventus and Milan, which was not a great final, in all fairness, there was a year where no Italian sides got to the quarterfinals of any of the three European Cup competitions, which really felt like a kind of a watershed moment.

“Italy’s dominance went back before the mid-90s, since the late 80s, with the rise of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan, you’d really see them as kind of the preeminent force, or certainly on a par with Spain in the European and perhaps world game. But through the 90s, looking at the stats on Italian clubs in the Champions League and the UEFA Cup, you would always have an Italian team in a final, sometimes two of them, and it was amazing.”

“A lot of things changed, I think other countries weren’t treating the game as a business, and once they did (particularly the Premier League clubs), they just have left Italy behind, because Italian football essentially depended upon the largesse of a series of patrons of people like Silvio Berlusconi, Franco Sensi and Massimo Moratti. Whilst incredibly wealthy by most people’s standards, when you get into a situation where nation-states get involved, as we’ve seen, particularly in the Premier League, then it’s just there’s no match involved, there’s no comparison.”

Richardson bounced back by co-presenting Setanta Sports’ The Friday Football Show and Football Matters shows with Rebecca Lowe between 2007 and 2009 before spending a brief stint with BBC’s Late Kick Off for the South West and South-West region. Bravo worked with ESPN’s coverage of Italian football before focusing on Serie A and the UEFA Champions League with BT Sport (now TNT Sports) from 2013 to 2017, as well as hosting the Fantasy Premier League Show by Premier League Productions. This past summer, he was sent to the United States as a member of the joint DAZN/5 presentation team for their coverage of the first-ever 32-team FIFA Club World Cup.

And next summer, he’ll be looking to play his part in the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup.

“I’ve worked on a couple of World Cups, and I think at the next one, I’m gonna be doing a nightly podcast on the tournament, and our plan is to be in the States doing that, which will be a lot of fun. I’ve covered it for TV in the past, and other people have that opportunity these days, but I’m glad that I had the opportunity to do it in the past. I’ll be essentially following the games and doing some talking with some clever people off the back of it. But yeah, what comes is there’s something unique about it.”

Richardson’s 9-5 job is hosting The Totally Football Show, which was incorporated into The Athletic’s podcast network in 2020. Whether discussing the favorites in the Premier League title race, or taking a look at D.C. United’s recent run of form, Richardson brings his expert delivery and welcoming conversational approach alongside seasoned journalists like James Horncastle, Raphael Honigstein, Julien Laurens, and Alvaro Romeo.

But whilst that’s his main gig, it’s far from his only one – he’s presented lesser-known sports like sumo, darts and cycling as well as niche competitions like the World’s Strongest Man and The Great Model Railway Challenge.

At nearly 60 years of age, Richardson is still going as strong as ever. And while he no longer does Italian-language content, he still credits his Italian fluency with streaming his rapid ascent in the industry.

“The most important advice I would say is learn a language. To be even broader than that, ‘Find a niche, make it your own, and then that makes you incredibly useful to people.’ They’re gonna want to have somebody who can do the work for them and tell them what they need to know from niche, whether it’s a type of football, or whatever your specialist subject matter is. If you can find a niche and corner that market, that’s such an amazing thing to have.”

“That’s what learning a language was for me, because that enabled me to have this job, and it’s helped me with some other things that I’ve done since then, but I think learning a language is such a huge thing in terms of being on TV, or broadcasting in general, I think the most important thing is to be myself, which might sound like an obvious thing, but I certainly spent years trying to be something that I thought a football presenter should be, and then realized it didn’t really matter The thing that viewers like when they watch people on TV, more than their credible expertise about football, or more than any of that stuff, particularly from a presenter’s point of view, is just for them to be able to see a little bit of your personality, and to feel relaxed with you.”

“If you’re yourself, and you don’t get upset if something goes wrong, and you don’t get upset if you make a mistake, and you don’t make people feel awkward. If you don’t have nervousness that makes the audience feel nervous on your behalf, then I think that’s the most comfortable thing that you can give an audience. The two other things I’d add, one is to speak slowly, and secondly, keep your questions short. If I could go back in time to the younger James Richardson, I would tell him to keep those questions short, because nobody’s here to hear you waffle on. It just sounds so messy…let’s just get yourself into difficulty all the time, whereas if you just speak slowly, you buy yourself time to think never remembered dirt, but if I could, that’s what I would do.”

Zach Lowy I GIFN