Over a year ago I found myself faced with an impossible conundrum. James Richardson had just announced his departure from the Guardian's Football Weekly podcast, which he'd been hosting since around 2006, to join a new company called Muddy Knees Media and host a new show, the Totally Football Show.
The question was, did I have time for two podcasts each week, both dropping on the same day each week, and which both talked about the same thing? Totally Football had James and a number of former Guardian writers, like Raphael Hönigstein and James Horncastle, but Football Weekly had Barry Glendenning's world-weary cynicism, and how could you do better than that? My choice was sealed when Barry recited the theme song to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air during the Guardian's coverage of the 2018 World Cup, and I've since left Totally Football as the backup or a supplement to when huge things happen in the Premier League.
But then I started to hear rumors of a new podcast from Muddy Knees Media. It was called Golazzo, and it was about Italian football. There was an interview with Nathaniel Chalobah, following his time playing in Italy, and when I listened to that I started to hear about other topics they were taking on.
So I downloaded one episode, and then another, and pretty soon Golazzo had entered my weekly rotation as a must-listen show every Wednesday. This way I got my fix of James Richardson and his puns, as well as James Horncastle's knowledge of Italian football and Italo-American-accented journalist Gabriele Marcotti (who also happens to be a fellow Columbia J-School alum), while also learning more about the recent history of Serie A and getting a rundown of what's happening in the Italian league each week.
What makes it great to listen to is that when I was working in London last year I finally picked up John Foot's magisterial history of Italian football, Calcio, so I understood some of the broad strokes of the game in Italy. But whereas Calcio had necessarily to devote most of its pages to the farther history of Serie A, Golazzo relies mostly on stories and characters from the last 20 years or so of the Italian game - the days when Serie A was the most glamorous league in the world and James Richardson himself hosted the Football Italia show for Channel 4.
The other thing that makes stories from the 90s and 00s so appealing to me is that I was starting to pay attention to football at that time. I get to hear more about the players who were current then, from how they got their starts to what they did later on in their careers. I just missed Football Italia as it ended and a non-terrestrial channel got the Serie A rights, so ironically once I moved to the UK it became harder for me to keep up with the game in Italy.
And beyond that, it's just nice to hear people talking knowledgeably about my home country. It's not really a side of myself I get to express very often, given that I don't have any Italian friends here in the Bay Area, but I do like being Italian and having this side of my personality that has nothing to do with my daily life. Usually I only get this feeling, of being quite far away from my American life, when I'm out in Turin with my cousins, but lately I've been getting it from Golazzo, too.
I sometimes wonder if other immigrants feel this way about their home country and their adopted country - the way your life in one doesn't really impinge on your life in the other, but that things in your home country just pick up where you left off from the last time you were there. Certainly traveling through eight or nine time zones and then speaking a different language at the end of it helps in separating the two places.
Oddly the immigrant experience is not one I've thought about much as it relates to my own life. I'm the first to admit I'm Americanized as fuck, but as time passes I become more interested in how coming here from a different culture has affected my perception of being American, and my desire to be American. Though I think that desire was stoked more by my time living in Britain, where feeling Italian was paradoxically even farther off than it is here, in many ways.
In any case, that's where the pleasure of Golazzo lies for me: getting closer to my roots and my home country at a time when that feels quite far away. Long may it last, or as they same in some parts of Italy: cent'anni!
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