The Sweeper: A World Football Podcast

We spoke to Lee Wingate and Paul Watson from The Sweeper Podcast, a fortnightly podcast which goes where no other football podcast goes to cover football games across the world…

Who are you and what’s your podcast about?

Lee: I started out as a football translator – a bit like José Mourinho but without the coaching ability – and moved into podcasting after I left the UK for Vienna, Austria, where I’ve lived since 2014. But I still work as an interpreter and translator for football clubs in the German Bundesliga too. The Sweeper is a podcast about football across the world – we talk about all 211 countries in FIFA and sometimes non-FIFA places too, such as Greenland. In fact, it was Greenlandic football that brought Paul and I together in the first place.

Paul: I started off as a journalist for Football Italia but refused to give up on my very unrealistic dream of playing international football, so a mate of mine and I decided to find the world’s lowest ranked national team and naturalise to play for them! That ended up changing to the slightly more realistic goal of coaching and I coached the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia for 18 months. When I came back to the UK I wanted to get back into journalism but focusing on the less travelled places, so I wrote a piece on Greenland’s national championship, which only lasts a week, for Four Four Two, and Lee happened to read that and got in touch. I’d followed his work for some time and we had a shared love for the less obvious places in world football, so we joined forces!

Lee & Paul podcasting in London

Why did you decide to start podcasting in the first place?

Lee: I had already started another podcast called “The Other Bundesliga” all about football in Austria. It was a way to get to know the country I was living in better and I was amazed to see how much interest there was in a country not regarded as a major footballing nation. I thought: If there is this much interest in Austria, imagine how much there could be in a podcast encompassing every nation around the world. And so The Sweeper was born.

Paul: I’d been appearing on other people’s podcasts as a guest for some time and still do get a semi-regular slot on Guardian Football Weekly, which I love, but I wanted somewhere I could go into more depth on the stories that interested me. When Lee and I decided to relaunch The Sweeper podcast, that was the chance to do exactly that.

Lee: Yes, I initially founded The Sweeper in 2021 with one of our now editors Tom Middler but the show wasn’t running anymore and we were only operating as a Twitter page for a while. Paul getting on board in January 2023 was the perfect opportunity to bring it back!

Can you tell us about your collaboration with FIFA+?

Lee: We’ve had podcast sponsorships and collaborations before and we know from experience it always feels much more natural and authentic when you use the product you’re talking about yourself. Paul and I have been using FIFA+, which is FIFA’s free platform showing live football all over the world, to watch matches for some time. We knew our audience would love it too and so when FIFA+ got in contact, it just seemed the perfect fit!

Paul: We’re very picky in that we don’t want to promote things we don’t believe in. So when FIFA+ approached it was a great chance for us because we genuinely do use it to watch many of the remote games we talk about. And our audience loves it too. They are often telling us about the games they’ve been watching – from Bolivia to Bhutan!

Lee at Stadio Druso, Bolzano, Italy

What was the first podcast you ever listened to?

Lee: Oh, that’s a good question. That will have been years ago, I think it must have been Guardian Football Weekly actually. I used to listen to it as a teenager. I never thought back then I’d be speaking on a podcast of my own one day.

Paul: I think it was also Guardian Football Weekly! When I was first asked to be a guest I was really star-struck!

Which podcasts do you take inspiration from?

Lee: Well, Guardian Football Weekly would fall into that category. I think I like it because it is done by journalists rather than ex-players, who tend to dominate the football punditry scene, and gets the balance just right between informative and fun. That’s a balance we try to have with The Sweeper now. I also like The Rest Is… series from the Goalhanger network because their hosts have such good rapport and bounce off each other so well. And finally, I also love Wondery shows such as British Scandal and The Spy Who. They master the art of storytelling so well and the presenters are great.

Paul: I find the Football Ramble pretty inspirational. The fact that pod started out being recorded in a bedroom and is now this huge phenomenon with a whole stable of podcasts attached to it.

Who would be your dream guest for the podcast?

Lee: That’s a tough one. We tell so many different stories on the podcast that we have mentioned every country in the world at least once on our 70-odd episodes to date. So it’s not like we are talking about the same people often. But given our love for the underdog, maybe San Marino coach Roberto Cevoli would be a good one to have. We would love to find out the inside story of how the world’s lowest ranked nation has turned its fortunes around so dramatically.

Paul: I’m a huge fan of James Montague and I’d love to get him on – he’s written some of the best books about football that exist in my opinion and touched on some nations and places that we cover. I’d like to get the Andorran legend Ildefons Lima on someday, after 26 years of playing for a minnow nation like Andorra you must have a few stories! Lee and I don’t tend to have so many guests but journalist Daniel Storey joined us to tell us about his trip to the Faroe Islands and blogger Matthew Eide told about his trip to Bhutan. That was great!

Paul in Pohnpei, Micronesia for the 2023 Futsal Tournament

Which episode would you say is the perfect introduction to your podcast?

Lee: We would like to think new listeners could join at any point and enjoy our shows right away. They are fortnightly round-ups of football all over the world and so it’s not like you need to have listened to the previous episode to understand the latest one. But the one entitled ‘A SAN MARINO PROMOTION, Hispaniola at the Gold Cup & Coupe de France controversy’ is probably a good one. It includes some of our favourite topics: we have been tracking San Marino’s 20-year winless run for some time and the French Cup provides some great away days. The episode also includes a bit of history, geography and geopolitics, as well as a good few laughs too, so it’s quite representative of what we’re about.

Paul: What is nice is that although we are responding to current events with our pods they stay pretty timeless, so if there’s a place in one that piques your interest you can still go back and listen to old episodes. I feel like our recent episode ‘Bhutanese monk ultras, a golden era for micro-states & the Southgate of the Solomons’ was a great example of how global the pod is but also telling stories you just won’t hear anywhere else. Where else would you learn about Bhutanese football fan, culture!

Do you have a favourite episode of the podcast, or one you are proudest of?

Lee: I’d say I am proud of ‘Switalian adventures, Welsh routes into Europe & the Vatican on tour’. I had just gotten home from a trip watching football in Switzerland and Italy, having spent two days on trains, and was so tired. Paul was ill. And the episode ended up being our second most popular ever.

Paul: It sounds like a cop-out but I do feel that the pod keeps improving. We’ve been doing this now for getting on for two years and I think now we know very well how the other works and how we can bounce off that. We’ve also learned better how to pack in lots of great stories but also have the freedom to just enjoy the chat rather than moving on too quickly.

As you look back on your podcasting journey, what challenges have you faced, and how have you overcome them to keep the show growing?

Lee: I would say that to do a research-intensive pod like ours well without earning any money from it at the start is a big challenge. It’s almost like having two full-time jobs and we definitely underestimated the difficulty of that. It’s also hard as an independent podcaster to get the word out there and grow. That has been tough but we’ve tried to appear on as many other shows as possible and we now have a growing community that we’re really proud of.

Paul: I do think people maybe don’t see how much work goes into the pod, but I suppose that maybe goes for all podcasts and you sort of don’t want the audience to just feel like it all comes together naturally and easily! I would say we have been very lucky to find superb editors in Tom Middler and Ralph Foster – they have done incredible work and without them we just wouldn’t have the pod we have.

Lee, Paul, and listeners celebrate San Marino’s first win in 20 years!

Football fans tend to be a devoted and loyal bunch – have you found that to be the case with The Sweeper listeners too? How important is audience interaction to the podcast?

Lee: They are but because we tell a lot of underdog stories and talk a lot about countries and leagues the listeners don’t really know so well, it’s not tribal at all. It’s just a really nice bunch of people who are interested in football across the wider world rather than just their Premier League team. But because we have followed San Marino so closely, most of our listeners have started to support them too. We try to interact with our listeners at every possible opportunity: some have joined us at matches, some talk to us on Discord. And we recently found out we had a nine-year-old listener called Albert and designed a quiz specifically for him. We wouldn’t be doing what we do without our audience so we try to show them how important they are to us whenever we can.

Paul: Our following is amazing and to have found this community of like-minded people is one of the great joys of The Sweeper. Sometimes you take a step back and look at the number of people who listen to your voice each episode and it’s hard to even imagine it.

What are your future plans for the podcast? Do you have any exciting projects or collaborations in the works?

Paul: We’ve been able to partner with some great content producers already, such as Copa 90, Away Days and The Tim Traveller, and we have some more collaborations in the pipeline. We’re also exploring live events we can do, whether that’s online or in person.

Lee: We also want to do more trips. For example, the Vatican has several football competitions but because it’s the world’s smallest sovereign state, there is no room for a pitch and they play in Rome instead. That would be a great story we’d love to tell. Mostly though, we want to grow the podcast to the point where we can dedicate ourselves to it fully without having to divide our time. Then we think we can make the Sweeper even better. And we already have an average rating of 5 stars from 700+ reviews on Apple and Spotify.

Where can the Pod Bible readers find out more about you?

Lee: We’re on basically every social media platform under the same handle: @sweeperpod. We post a lot of world football updates on Twitter and BlueSky but we are also active on Instagram and Facebook with plenty of content from our travels. You can also search for ‘The Sweeper – A World Football Podcast’ on your podcast platform of choice. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all the other usual places.

Paul: We release a main podcast every fortnight on a Wednesday and our Patreon subscribers get a bonus pod to fill the off weeks, plus they get a newsletter each week packed with additional exclusive stories, some of which aren’t featured on any of our pods. We also have a Discord chat community, run some great football shirt giveaways, release bonus blogs and give our patrons a sneak preview of our podcast agenda.

Listen to The Sweeper Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast apps >>

This article was produced as part of a paid advertising package. To enquire about advertising with Pod Bible email info@podbiblemag.com