Hello and welcome to the TIFO Football Podcast. My name's Joe. The regular podcast isn't back yet. We will be in a week or two's time. We're just sorting a few things out. But in the meantime, we have a very special episode that I'm really pleased that we're able to publish. Tifa Football Content Editor Seb Stafford Blore recorded a conversation with Michael Calvin, who's an award-winning author. His previous works were called The Nowhere

Men, where he revealed the extraordinary life of football scouts. After that, he wrote Living on

the Volcano, talking about the pressures on football managers, No Hunger in Paradise,

chronicled the hardships of young players striving to make it in football, and yesterday,

the 23rd of August, Michael published State of Play, which investigates,

and I'm reading now from the blurb, investigates the human stories of football, from mental

health to money, concussion to the Champions League, fan owners to oligarchs, women's football,

to World Cups, Calvin gets under the skin of the beautiful game and reveals why it's truly the game of our lives. This is based on hundreds of interviews with leading figures from around the world, from Arsendanger to Stephen Gerard. Calvin reveals the winners, the losers, the politics, the pleasure, the hope and the despair of the world's most popular sport. Now, I haven't read the book myself yet, but Seb who conducted the interview as, and he loves it, as you'll be able to hear from this episode. As someone who hasn't read it, listening to this earlier, it was brilliant. I think it was full of really interesting stories. And I think what makes it more interesting is that Michael seems to have written this to a theme, so there's lots of diversity in the sorts of stories that he's talking about so I really do hope you enjoy today's episode as I said the usual podcast will resume in a week or two's time apologies for the wait there but thanks so much to Seb and Michael Calvin for sorting this one out one final note before you do listen to it the audio quality isn't superb it was recorded down the phone it's the only way we could make the interview happen But you will be surprised how quickly you get used to it, okay? So stick with it for the first five minutes and afterwards you won't even notice. Thank you so much for downloading and we will be back with you again soon. Incidentally, if you like this episode and you want to hear more like this, do let us know. It's definitely something we can do. And I think that, you know, this one in particular, it's a really great episode.

As I said, I'm really pleased to be able to publish it.

So let us know if you like it and we'll think about doing some more like this.

Okay. Thanks very much. And here's Seb. Hello, welcome to the TFO Football Podcast. No Alex and no Joe today, so you've stuck with me.

But we do have Michael Calvin with us.

And today is actually publication day for his new book, State of Play.

And he is joining us now.

Mike, how are you?

I'm good, thanks, Seb. You, well.

Very well, mate. Very well.

So when I remember speaking to you for the first time about this book, about six months ago,

and you were still in your writing stage. and you talked about Arthur Hotcrafts, the football man.

For maybe some of the younger listeners, describe the book's impact on you. I mean, you cover it in the book, but it's such a seminal piece of work. It probably deserves another airing.

Well, it's probably why I'm sat here now talking down the line to you. Basically, it was, this is almost a homage to two people this book in a way.

It's to my dad and to Arthur Hotockcraft, and they're linked in some

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