4: Joe Devine: Tifo Football explains it all

I believe there are no boring stories, there are no boring facts, there's just boring ways of framing the facts. Within the realm of what is true and what is interesting, there's a Venn diagram there, there's a middle ground, and most of my job is spending time trying to think about what that is. Hello and welcome to Outlines, a podcast about sport, stories and the media. My name's Owen Connelly and I'm delighted to bring you the latest in a series of conversations with journalists and authors, broadcasters, filmmakers, executives, innovative creators and campaigners, exploring the changing relationship between sport and the stories and communities that build around it. So a big part of why I thought this podcast might be a worthwhile exercise is that there are so many ways to approach sport as a topic or a theme or a cultural phenomenon. There's a lot of different narratives to mind from it, a lot of personal and social material too. And the same is true of today's media environment, it's challenging to say the least, but there are so many different routes to an audience and to making an outlet stand up. I guess this time is kind of emblematic of that. Jo DeVine is the voice of TFO football, a video and podcast brand that's deeply rooted in a curiosity about the game and the places it meets the world around it. TFO established its identity through a distinctive set of animated explainer videos covering everything from the history of football to its commercial and geopolitical dimensions and its tactical intricacies. As a company, it's been brought twice, first by the athletic, which was subsequently taken over by the New York Times and Jo is now officially deputy head of video at the athletic. But while that certainly had some influence on the output and led to the creation of a TFO sport, strand of videos more recently, TFO football has very much retained its own particular spirit, interests and perspective. I spoke to Jo about the inspiration for TFO football, its journey over the past few years, its relationship with its audience, curiosity and discoverability in digital sports media, how he and his team think about choosing and framing stories, and even a little bit on a side project he's apparently trying to keep quiet, but which we mentioned here. There's a lot of really interesting ground to cover and it's a lot of fun. So here is Jo Devin. So this is that thing now that we're doing where it's as though we've been having a conversation. And also as though we haven't had a full start and someone has just started recording halfway through. So it's something you do on your podcast is you recap at the start. So I'm guessing you recorded that at the end. Well, most people will do it as though they're just about to have the conversation, but they've actually just had the conversation. And you guys completely break the fourth wall pieces all over the floor and you're just kind of rowing with your producer about bits you're forgetting to put in. How has studied some of that stuff with T-Fo? This is something I guess we'll get to in a minute, the sort of the T-Fo identity, but you know which way round is it? Is it the stuff that you, is it kind of your personalities that are coming out or is it you thinking well this is the audience and what the audience wants or how do you, how do you construct that? It's a good question. Well, I would say as a starting point, it's not hugely studied. It's sort of very natural. Initially we obviously it's easier to do as you realize and you're kind of exposing the trick as we record it today. It's much easier for you to do the introduction to the podcast after we finish recording because then you'll know what we've spoken about. And as you say, the ordinary way of doing that is to then preempt it as though to say this is a bounce I happen to hear is what I'm going to ask. I like to keep the T-Fo podcast audience in a sort of suspension of disrespect and respect at the same time. I want to respect the, I'm not patronized them because they know that we're doing the intro at the end. But also I want to disrespect them as much as I can throughout the process. And I think the reason we started doing that is because there was, I found something very funny about the idea of listing all the things we didn't talk about in the show that might upset them. Right. Or might be the reason for them to stop listening. So if you're a new castle fan, you can stop now because we don't talk about your team today. And do it deliberately doing the opposite of what would be best practices to try to keep retention. Yeah. I thought that was funny. And I think that's why the structure is what it is now. So sort of by consequence of ADSC really. Yeah. So there you go. Nice, nice meta question to start in a podcast about media. But let's not everyone is going to be a TFO football podcast or TFO sports explainer listener or viewer or what have you. So I think it's probably fair enough to set the terms before we carry on. So how would you define TFO as it is now? And how did you, how did you guys get started? Well, I would define TFO as largely a football media video brand. And it's sort of in, you know, you've kind of touched on this already. But it's in two sometimes distinct elements. One, we make a lot of animated explainer videos, which are fairly serious and of a neutral tone and where we explain all sorts of topics from, you know, the tactics of football teams employ on the pitch to. You know, broader club strategy to much, much broader geopolitical issues. And we have a lot of fun doing that. But we, you know, sort of a slightly more serious quest. The other element of it is the TFO football podcast, which features me as the host with some of my colleagues. And that's a little bit sillier. We talk more about, you know, the day to day football. We don't take it particularly seriously. I like to think of it as sort of two sides of the same coin. And in reality, what TFO is in both of those facets is a reflection of sort of different parts of my personality, my identity. I feel as though I embody both of those things. I have the ability to be very, very silly about something and not take it seriously at all. And also, as everyone does the capacity to be deeply interested in something and take it seriously. The, the, from a branding perspective, the identity doesn't line up at all. And it's a big hot mess. Very confusing. But I don't care. I think it's, I think it's good. But when usually, usually when someone comes up to me in the street and they, they, they talk to me about TFO, it's because they listen to the podcast. And if they don't know who I am, but they've heard of TFO, it's because they watch the animated videos. And that's like, that's really how I define the brand. Sure. Sure. How did it get started? Well, TFO was, was born out of another football media company. It was a company called UMACC Football, which was started by a guy called Neil Clerk. And it was essentially a predict again based around the Premier League. It been through various different iterations. It, it started originally as something else entirely. And as a result of a changes along the way, it kind of evolved into this, this final stage of just a free predict a game for audiences to use. And Neil hired me initially as, I think as a social media manager. My job was just to tweet about football and try to draw eyes towards this thing, this product that he'd built. And he had a, he also had a really great editorial website where he hired all sorts of writers. I mean, many of whom actually now work for the athletic. So I remember James McNeckless as gunna blog did a lot of writing for UMACC at the time. So I've staff of law who's still part of the TFO podcast and works with the athletic also was there as well as a, you know, like a number of other recognizable names. And initially, yeah, my job was just to promote those articles, which served in themselves as promotion for this, for this tool. And so, after a while, I realized that it wasn't really a real job. Like Neil was lovely and paid me, you know, full time salary, but I didn't really have anything to do. I felt a little bit guilty about it. So I started to mess around and make some videos and see if I could, you know, add any value that way. So I got six or seven different types initially. Most of them were intentionally humorous and no one watched them or found them funny. And then eventually I stumbled upon what would be recognized as the first TFO video was about John stones at the time. And it was just, it did really really well. We released on YouTube loads of people like loads of people watched it in relation to the people that were watching our existing videos, people who were reading our articles. It was kind of clear overnight success. And so I made more of them and more of them. And that was at a time where the business, what wasn't really working in its in its format of the of the moment. And so Neil and I talked, we restructured things, we, you know, we changed the name to TFO and then we worked together again for another couple of years on this until we eventually sold it to the to the athletic. So he had this very strange sort of unlikely origin story. Also one. in which I feel I had no personal risk in it. Like, you know, I meet a lot of other people who've started businesses and sold them and, you know, they're always kind of keen to talk about what it means to have invested yourself and something. I was feel like a bit of a fraud in those conversations because I never put any of my own money into this. This was something that was paid for by somebody else. I had the idea and I built it and I feel proud that I was able to build something that, you know, an audience loved and came to was drawn to and I feel proud that that kind of came out of my mind. But I didn't really have the same experience of some of those other people, but I've met and it just seemed, it just kind of happened starts that it occurred. - Yeah, it feels kind of fitting. And so it's kind of an exercise in following your curiosity and it ended up being a thing that's kind of explains football in one sense or another. I mean, we'll get to that kind of dichotomy between the tactical stuff that some of the team do and the explains that you guys still do. Why T-File, by the way, was that just, did you just do a Google search and think what vaguely football related term has not been used for a media company yet? Or I've been through this in the last couple years, so I'm very aware of that. - That was definitely the starting point. And also the other contender you may find amusing that was overlapped at the time, which obviously has since been taken. So I assume they took the same route that we did. But T-File, I don't, I think I've maybe heard the word T-File once or twice before, before we used it, but when I found it, it was, first I love what it looks like. I'm a sucker for what a word looks like written down and T-File, it just looks fantastic written down. It was very easy for me to think about what a monogram, like a single T logo would look like for that too. I immediately saw the yellow color when I saw that word. And then when I read the definition of what it meant, which is, for anyone listening that doesn't know, whenever you see a huge piece of art displayed in a stadium held up by multiple people, either one big T-File sewn together on a sheet, or you can even use the word to describe when individuals hold up little placards that then together make an image. That's a T-File. And it's an Italian word. And given that our videos were animated, and it felt like the kind of the perfect definition of the perfect expression of what we were trying to do. And also T-Files are something that are created and generally created and displayed by supporters of these teams by the grassroots level. And I have always felt as though we've tried with T-Files to make sure that the content that it's creating and what it's explaining is there for supporters and is there to explain things that people actually care about and not things that people pretend to care about or things that sponsors would like us to care about. And so it also felt from a social perspective, it also felt like the right level as well. But yeah, Kate did come from a Google search. It was, again, sort of happens to dance very lucky to stumble upon it. - Yeah. Also feels like I mean, T-Files are having a moment. I feel like the later stages of the European competitions this year, some of the English teams have been rolling them out to varying degrees of success. But it feels like-- - Yeah, Chris and Pallis, right? - Of course, in the FA Cup Final. But it feels like a word that your audience would have been very familiar with when T-Files started what eight, 10 years ago. I don't know if that's accidental or not. - Oh, you mean like it was a word-- - It's in their vocab. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be in the vocab of the kind of person who, maybe I'm generalizing a bit, but you might enjoy your output. - That's okay. - I think so. I think maybe that's the case. I was always surprised though, but I was in the position too, but many people ask me what it means. I think for European followers of T-Files, for non-English speaking European followers, for any Italian, obviously. They all know what it means already, but I'm forever having English people come up and ask me what the name means. And a lot of people think it means today I found out, because that's also an acronym that's used on. - Right, on Reddit. - And also makes sense with, in a kind of explainery concept. But yeah, it's definitely become more mainstream over the years. - Yeah, you've never claimed that one today I found out. No. (laughing) How important is that art style? Given that it's so intrinsic to the name, I think people who know T-Files will recognize that animated style that you use, or the kind of semi-animated style that you use for the explainer videos. How important do you think that's been to establishing a bit of a brand, a bit of an identity for you guys? - I think it's completely crucial. I think without it, we wouldn't be a success. And I don't think that's because the scripted work isn't good, or because we haven't worked with good writers, or because there's no value on what we're saying. I think it was a lot easier to stand out eight years ago when we started than it is today. It's much, much harder now, but it's still mattered. And when I look back at some of our first T-Files videos, I mean, all of the first ones, they were written, voiced, and animated by me. And I only now do one of those things because there are better people writing and animating all of our videos, thank God. But they stood out because of what they looked like because they were so different from everything else, because it was clear that someone had spent time doing it. And I just, I think if I've written those scripts and published them as written words somewhere, no one would have been interested, no one would have cared. And I think in certain circumstances, we've been very lucky because we have a big audience now to be able to create work with writers, with authors, that probably couldn't exist anywhere else. And I'm very proud that we've been able to do that. But for example, I think my favorite piece of work that T-Files ever created was a head of the Qatar World Cup in 2022. We worked with James Montague author to release a five-part series, explaining how Qatar won the World Cup, but also explaining the whole history of this country in a fascinating region. This very little to do with football, it's personally found it very fascinating. And I always had it in my mind as this was something that it required more resources than normal. It was a bit longer, it felt very special to us. It was very niche and it seemed as we were worried that nobody would watch it. And then a million people watched the first video. And it was my happiest moment because that was something that I was genuinely truly interested in that felt as though we hadn't cynically made it for a broader audience. That it was our specific take on something. And that everybody wanted to see it. And everybody was interested in it. And I feel very strongly that although a much, much smaller audience would have absolutely loved the written scripted version of that, it wouldn't have reached anywhere near as many people. So I think the art style is completely crucial. Not just to the success of the business, but also it's crucial to the accessibility to broader audiences. I want to make sure that whenever we make a video about anything, whether it's as simple as why Col Parmer is good at scoring goals or it's as complicated as he's out, you know, a golf state took over a football team. I want everybody who likes football to be able to watch and understand that. And I think loads of people are visual learners. So having that, having art there to help them learn is, yeah, not just crucial to the success of the business, but crucial to the videos being more comparable, you know? Yeah, yeah. Something I was going to come back to, but to be honest, it probably makes sense just to explore it now. But there's something else I feel like with video and YouTube in particular, whereas because YouTube is effectively like a search engine, that if people are curious about something and they want to find out, you know, why, how, how did Qatar get the 2022 World Cup? Then that sort of explainer style works quite well in that space specifically because that's what people will uncover in those searches. Is that something, I mean, you're kind of more in the guts of stuff now. We're getting ahead of ourselves in terms of the T5 journey, but you're more in the guts of the sort of analytics and everything else. And is that fair assessment? I think so. Yeah, it's always interesting when we talk about search because there are a couple of different ways of thinking about it. I mean, search as a broad, you know, analytical term in these conversations generally means when someone type something into the search bar and the video comes up as a response or when someone type something into a search engine and a video comes up as a response. Obviously, YouTube is owned by Google and Google has vested interest in showing YouTube videos high up its search rankings. So if you are able to sufficiently answer a question that a lot of people are asking at an appropriate moment, then you're very likely to be served by Google in doing that. You're very likely to be served by YouTube in doing that. What's interesting though is when you look at the analytics or the breakdown of where the audience came from for any of our videos. And this is also the case for most YouTube videos. It's not just specific to TFO. You will find that when you do answer a question that people are asking, the search proportion of your traffic is a little bigger. It's still tiny in comparison to a traffic that's come from what they call the homepage, which is just people who've opened YouTube and seen your video on their homepage and clicked on it. It's generally also smaller than suggested videos or suggested next videos when someone's already watching a video on YouTube and your video comes up as in the sidebar. as a suggestion to watch next. That doesn't mean they're not interested in the answer to the question, in fact, the fact that they've clicked on it, in their holds in those environments, means they probably are. It does mean that they weren't searching for it. So I think the way that we try to think about it from an editorial perspective, when we're thinking about what people care about, we like to think about it in the same way that we assume that observational standup comedians do, right? Where you're picking something that you know people will want to know the answer to, whether or not they've thought to ask the question, is sort of, you know, a little bit more irrelevant. So yeah, I mean, I think like, spending a lot more time looking at analytics can be very, very useful in terms of understanding how to target specific audiences, or even just particularly in thinking about framing, like how to frame a story in a particular way. Generally speaking, I very confidently say that, I believe there are no boring stories, there are no boring facts, there's just boring ways of framing the fact. And I have an ethical responsibility, obviously, as part of the athletic and as part of the new times, to ensure that my framing never edges into the world of being sensational or being clickbait or being untrue. But within the realm of what is true and what is interesting, there's a vendigrown there, there's a middle ground. And most of my job is spending time trying to think about what that is. I think it's like a service to the audience. I think if you frame something that could be interesting in the wrong way and an audience don't watch it because they're either not interested in the title or they didn't like the first few seconds of it, it's kind of your fault that you've deprived them of something that they otherwise might have enjoyed learning. So I think it's like a hugely important part of the job. - Yeah, what are some of the stories that interest you then in that explainer space? And how do you separate the things that you have a journalistic interest in or a creative interest in from what you know other audiences might be interested in or might be getting served or what might get you up the algorithmic food chain? - Yeah, it's a question. I mean, personally, I'm very interested in the kind of intermingling of football and geopolitics. I think football's a really great microcosm through which to explore everything. That's why it's sort of, you know, when I say I love football, I mean it honestly, I don't always love sitting down at the weekend and watching what happens on the pitch, but I love the concept of football and I love that you can't really go anywhere in the world without someone wanting to talk to you about it or having played it or supporting a team. And so obviously it becomes this incredible microcosm through which to explore all of these other ideas. Sometimes that's trickier than other times. Sometimes it's pretty straightforward, but I mentioned James Montague already. I've, you know, it's been, I'm so proud of being able to work with James over the years 'cause I really respect him as an author. And he's written about lots of really interesting places. He's traveled around the whole world. He's always got an interesting take on something. And I trust his editorial sensibilities too. But when we first started working together, he had just published his book, The Billionaires Club, which was about the, you know, Premier League's richest owners. And the first three or four videos we made together were just simple profiles of people, people like Mansor, for example, who own Manchester City or a profile of San Crunquet who owns Arsenal. And I think not only am I fascinated by those people, but I'm also fascinated by why they choose to invest in sport, so mechanisms by which they do so. So I would say over the years, personally, I've found the most interesting exploring that avenue. And then the sort of flip side of it to stories in which groups of ordinary people have been able to use football in one way or another to improve their, improve their own circumstances. And another of my favorites from our catalog is a video we made about Iraq winning the 2008 Asian Cup, which is, it's a story that's been told many times before. I think it's a particularly beautiful story. And one of the reasons it touches me or it moves me in the way that it does is because football, I've felt it and seen it myself. Football has the ability to captivate and capture a whole group of people who otherwise might believe and think different things and, you know, feel different ways about things. It has the ability to kind of pause everything for a moment in time, which is exactly what happened for Iraq in 2008. And it's sort of lovely to be able to really live moments like that. These topics are not always the most popular. I mean, in Iraq, the 2008 Asian Cup is the most popular. Well, it's often you can imagine, but around the rest of the world, it's more difficult to get, you know, a young American teenager, for example, interested in that story or to think about why they should care that X billionaire is buying X-club or investing in certain places. So there's a modicum of balance that comes to our editorial planning. We know, for example, we released a video on Palestine's Football Club yesterday, which we knew that people A probably wouldn't like and B, it wouldn't be watched very well. The view number would be fairly low. We believe that it's important for us to do that. So the next video is going to be on a big club or, you know, like the next couple are going to be things that we know that the audience will definitely like, so that we can satisfy our higher ups as well. And we can, you know, try to make sure that we keep the audience there as well as take the opportunity when we have it to cover these more sort of challenging areas. Yeah. There's a lot of transfer stories coming up and a lot of players, if you're going to want to become quite familiar with quite quickly. So by which segue, let's talk about the other strand of TFO, which is really accelerated in the last sort of few years, and it's a specialism of a couple of the guys on your team, JJ Bull and John McKenzie in particular, which is that tactical, deep dive analysis. You know, how did that develop? And was that something that kind of came through the team? Is that something that has a kind of natural, there's a natural marriage between that and the other off field explainer stuff? It's just sort of a deeper way of looking at football. Where did that come from? Yeah. It's a really interesting question. I've always thought of it as the same. I always think of it as, you know, if you're a curious football fan and you're anything like me, you will eventually end up reading this theory in the same way that you will eventually end up reading about the billionaire who's bought the team. The origins I will specifically are, I mean, I think it can be tracked back to when I was working with Alex Stewart, who no longer works at TFO. He's currently the CEO of Analytics FC. I think having all of the time in football data. But Alex was very interested in football tactics, and we spent a lot of time talking about it together. He wrote years ago a website called The Set Pieces, which was run by Ian McIntosh of Totally Football. He, Alex wrote this great series. It was called Moneyball and Football Manager, something like that. And it was genuinely gripping at Soundstupid, but it was like eight chapters, I think, of him taking, so I think it was a seri-b team all the way to the Champions League final using the kind of, you know, archetypal structures of Moneyball. And I remember reading it at the time, thinking, "This is amazing." And also reading, you know, inverting the pyramid by Jonathan Wilson and reading some of the work that Michael Cox was publishing, on his blog and in The Guardian. And I think the reality is, if you are someone who talks about football and what happened in a game to try to understand it in the pub, depending on who you're doing that with, or what level you take that conversation to, it will always eventually end up becoming a conversation about tactics, whether you describe it in that way or not, you define it that way to yourself or not. That's essentially what you're talking about. So I think when people say, you know, quote, tactics to describe these sorts of conversations, really, I think it's just the sort of more advanced end of the pub conversation that is of interest to some people and isn't of interest to others. For us, it was a completely natural fit because, again, was like a demonstration of how we were thinking about it of what we were interested in, but also what was worth explaining. And we made a number of tactical videos, generally, of our explainers of big famous teams from the past and how they played and how things changed over time. But the first one that really did extremely well, I think it was our biggest ever video at the time of release was Alex's video about Antonio Conte's 343 at Chelsea in 2016, 2017 time. Because that was the first time for ages that there'd been like a meaningful back three in the Premier League. And it felt as though tactics was on the table for discussion. There was T-fo, we'd kind of already been in the area for a while. And that video exploded because it turned out, yeah, there were loads of people wanted to know why this was the case. And it sort of touched the mainstream for the first time in a way that I think it does very regularly now. It seems, you know, however many eight years later, nine years later, you see on match of the day, XG is a metric that is discussed very regularly. It's not uncommon. fork for this to be part of the mainstream conversation, but it really was at the time. I think largely I put it down to Alex and I being interested in it, Alex being great at writing about it and just write time and right place, really. Yeah. It's now, I guess, it's probably stuff that you put out. Would you say you put it out more regularly because there's obviously going to be a conversation to be had after every weekend of football and one of the guys gets in front of the tactics board and explains it? Is that stuff now more of your meat and drink than the animated stuff or not your meat and drink, but at least the thing that kind of self-perpetuates make me a bit more? Yeah, it's hard to say really. Without wanting to be boring and administrative, there's a branding distinction between the animated videos that we make and then the tactical video. So John and JJ who mentioned before my colleagues, they released these videos on the channel called The Athletic FC and called my remit where I work is to, is also to oversee the athletics UK video content. We sort of deliberately moved tactical content as we're describing it here over to The Athletics Umbrella because it pairs very nicely with a lot of their written work because also it's a different experience watching someone do it to a camera instead of watching the animated element of it. But I think for example, John and JJ are so good at it that it seems a waste to not have them doing it. And also it's something that has grown in popularity throughout the industry which is it's lovely to see. I mean, I think I don't say this is to claim that we will quote the first to do it or anything like that, but it's very nice to see something that you're invested in deeply along with other creators then expand other people to join in. And also for I think the tone of broadcast programming to change slightly as well and to feel as though we've had some kind of influence over the conversation in that regard. I'm very proud of that. I'm proud of that too. But yeah, to answer your question, I think tactical content is our bread and butter. Because what many people come to us expecting. And I think if you asked someone who don't really had sort of tertiary interaction with the brand, what we're known for, it's what that's what they would say. It's tactical content. Yeah, because the point I was getting to really was less that distinction and more that that's something where you have regular contact with your audience and you also have overlapping contact with other parts of the athletic audience as well who may become through the sort of team specific stuff. And I like, why are we not getting any goals or whatever? But do you feel like that appetite for that type of analysis has changed? And do you feel like there is an audience that was either underserved or has just kind of changed in its actually? I mean, you guys literally have a book called How to Watch Football. Which is like a neutral's guide if you like because very people aren't great at watching football as neutral's. I have an awesome season to get. I'm there twice a month. I'm so sorry. Been a long season. But I find there will be games where I'll check out analysis afterwards and be like, oh, so and so on. The other team had a really good game. I barely watched the other team. Whereas, of course, to watch a game as a neutral, you're watching it. You're watching the whole board to borrow a term from another pursuit. Do you feel like that's something that's changed in football audiences? Or do you feel like there's just more coverage available now in this era and you're able to serve that type of an audience more than the sort of partisan traditional audience? Yeah. That's a really good question because I think there's sort of three different things going on there. One of them is interesting as it relates to the athletics business model as well. Because you make the point that when you go and watch Arsenal, you barely watch the other team. You're so invested in your team. If you subscribe to the athletic as a reader, you're presumably subscribing largely for the Arsenal coverage. I think, first I would say that with the tactical content in mind, years ago when we began, there was definitely an audience interested in it that were being underserved. That was clear from the huge numbers of people that kind of flocked to subscribe to T for a year ago. It was largely because of the tactical content that we created. That was very clear to me that there was an opportunity here. They were already fantastic brilliant people doing this in written word, Michael Cox and Jonathan Wilson, who I mentioned earlier, just a couple of them. By no means did we do this before anybody else. I think we happened to put this to video before anybody else did in a way that didn't require broadcast footage because the other reason that there was a sort of scarcity of it, and I think another reason for the success of T for retrospectively, is that the Premier League's broadcast, which is guarded so gellously, for understanding reasons because of how much it costs by broadcasts like Sky. Less Sky are making additional complimentary content with the football that they have to show. You could be an independent creator and make a tactical explainer with some football footage and get it taken down off YouTube when Sky copyright flagged six days later. You obviously can't do that as a business. At the time when we started, I wasn't aware of any other publisher that was making anything animated in this way. That was our perfect route around this obstacle. I think the reason there was a big audience there was because the scarcity was being created as a result of business decisions elsewhere and that we were animating gave us the opportunity to circumvent those to a certain extent. Yeah. Yeah. We've touched on it a couple of times and particularly in the context of the athletic, but you've effectively been bought twice in the last few years because you were bought by the athletic and subsequently the athletic was bought by the New York Times and now Wordall pays your salary indirectly or directly. What's the impact of that being? You have a slightly different job title now as well and you have a slightly different remit as you've touched on a couple of times. You've got a slightly wider remit with the athletic. How has that affected your brand? We've talked a lot about the value of the art style and things like that. Have there been things that you felt it's important to protect this while leveraging this or how have you approached that? Well, personally, I love it that Wordall pays my salary because I get to watch, I get to play Wordall every night and then once I've completed it, also say thank you for the payment at the end of the month, Wordall. Much appreciated. It's lovely to have something so inconsequential. It's a big lesson for anyone in media. It really is. It's again, you should learn it now. It was very funny for us at the athletic also because the New York Times purchase of Wordall took place around the same time that the New York Times purchased the athletic and obviously the deal for the athletic as published in various different places was for a huge amount of money. I think the deal for Wordall at least reflected economically was a significantly smaller deal or much less meaningful. The acquisition of the athletic was almost completely covered by covers of New York Times purchase of Wordall. Born out to be a fair reflection, I would say Wordall is the best thing ever, isn't it? I absolutely love that game. What was your question? I'm just thinking about Wordall now. What is your question? How have you thought about the T-5 journey? That is quite the rabbit hole. I came in doggedly wishing to defend all of T-fo's brand values. It turned out that they didn't want to take any of them away anyway. They largely aligned with the editorial values of the athletic. I wanted to make sure that things were correct and considerate and so did the newsroom at the athletic. It was a perfect match in some ways. I will say on a slightly more corporate internal basis, I have been aided greatly by the fact that T-fo doesn't share the athletics name because in terms of being able to obey different ports within the business who may wish to express some authority over what it looks or sounds like. In some cases, particularly when you go to America, some people haven't even heard of T-fo. I don't even know that it exists. I get to make it look or sound like whatever I want. I think as long as people respect the work that's being created, they're very reticent to touch it anyway. It has, T-fo has a huge audience. It's kind of undeniably big and I think people are respectful of that and people are cautious around in any changes that are made. It's something that me and the guys that do the T-fo podcast see in the comments regularly. There's a general skepticism or conspiracy around any time we announce a change to anything we're doing. There's always the assumption that it's like the publisher of the New York Times that has told us to do this or someone in America that said, "You must only podcast once a week now instead of twice," or whatever it is. It's only ever us. We have all the support we need from the business. I can imagine having gone through this experience. I can imagine how an acquisition could go badly and how a company culture could be changed or eroded over time or how brand values could change over time. I can absolutely see the touch points where that would take place. I can honestly say that it's never concerned me at all here. I think that's really because the, yeah, I'm going to use an awful word now, but because the brand synergy was there from the beginning. To a greater or lesser extent is also there between the athletic and the New York Times. There have been some changes since the New York Times took over at the athletic largely for the better, in my opinion. The authority of the journalism, it's lovely. I joked before about wordle, but it's lovely to work within the umbrella of a company that cares very deeply about journalism because it understands that journalism is the reason for its success. That just is not the case, I would say, in a number of other places. So any of the drawbacks might be, I think that's very important to me and that matters. I see the difference that that makes on a day to day basis. Yeah. I mean, we've talked quite a bit about how TFO is either a product of the year or it's been affected or it's kind of ridden a lot of change through the internet media era. Do you think it's something that could have existed before or their antecedence? Is there something like TFO or is it that being able to have that marriage of output and community and audience and all that? The sheer space that internet and social media gives you to operate in. Are there inspirations from the 19s that you can think of or what would you say? I would say if I separate the sort of creative from the business element, then it is something that has existed before. The approach to storytelling, the type of stories that we tell, the type of things that we explain, there are all things that buckets of audiences have been interested in since the dawn of time and have discussed either around a coffee table, around a fireplace, perhaps in an internet forum, maybe at a local community centre. I think the business could not have existed before. The business is completely reliant on modern platforms and their ability to distribute the correct content to the correct audience member. TFO, it seems mainstream now and I laugh every time I hear someone describe us as mainstream media because I just don't feel that way about it even though I recognise the reality of it. But we still covered niche topics. As we discussed, might be a bigger part of football, geopolitical conversations might be a bigger part of football, they are still not the, you know, they're still not like canon discussions, they are, they're still niches. And that TFO has the ability to be one of the biggest football YouTube channels whilst operating only in these areas is entirely due to the fact that YouTube is so good at providing audiences with the content that they want. When you add all of those niches together, you have a business. You can't do that. I think, you know, you have a book club. So TFO could have existed before as a really fun book club. Would have loved it. I would have gone every week. And I would have, you know, tyrannically led it in the same way that I do the current podcast. But no, I think the business element of it, I can't see a way that it would have, would have ever worked before. Yeah. You've got to go in a couple of minutes and we have a couple of questions that we're going to ask everyone on outlines. But you have a side project. There's actually like, it's kind of flourishing. It's called "Movies You Forgot You Forgot". We weren't going into too much depth about, you know, how it came to be or anything like that. But what's your experience of, you know, kind of pop culture, art, the audience as opposed to a sports audience and the expectations and just the kind of exercise from your point of view of talking about these things? I will be very honest with you and say, I don't know because the whole purpose of that project was, was to make something with my friend Adam and we talk about films once a week. But also be to have somewhere that I could do that that wasn't listened to by tens and tens of thousands of people so that I could maybe, not with the intention of getting away with the same things that I can't say elsewhere, but just somewhere where I could be a bit more creative and expressive without having to worry that if I did it by accident, you know, I was going to be in trouble. And unfortunately it's become more successful than I either have intended it to. So it's just another anger when you turn out. But I think to be brutally honest, I think 90% of the audience has just come from the TFO podcast. I really wish I knew how to find people who had never heard of TFO before and just wanted to come and talk about some niche movies. But I find this interesting to discuss anyway. I think podcasts as maybe you're about to find out or not are like the most difficult medium to be discoverable because the platforms where they live are rubbish at discoverability. I just spent ages probably too long talking about how YouTube is incredible at delivering videos to people that want to see them. Apple podcasts and Spotify and any of the other places that these audio only podcasts live, they're rubbish. For rubbish at doing that. That's not what they're built to do at all. In fact, they don't do it. So unless you do all of your own marketing, no one will ever listen to the thing. That's why I thought I would be safe. But it turns out I wasn't. So I don't know. I can't tell you anything about that other than please, please don't listen to me alone. Wow. We can't promise but we can try. Right. Couple of questions before I let you go. Do you have an origin story? Is there something that kindled your interest in sport? Yeah, it's quite sad though. Do you want a sad one? I mean, stories, the stories, right? That's true. That is true. Well, I do. In fact, someone asked me the other day, we just did a live show in Wolfenstover the weekend. And afterwards I went to the bar and I got chatting to a couple of people who come to the show and they said to me, they asked me which team I support because I've never really said that on any of the podcasts or the videos. And I'm not going to say it here either because the truth is that I don't really support a team. I have a team that my father supported who I grew up supporting. But I told them what I'll tell you now, which is the reason I don't talk about it often is because it's kind of a bummer and it doesn't always fit into humorous scenario. But growing up, I supported this team and I watched football and liked football because my father did. And then I sort of, my parents divorced and I didn't watch it as much as a teenager. And then my father died when I was 18 and I remember watching a couple of games that year in the weeks after he died and just thinking, you know, this isn't for me. The connection there was a familial one which had gone at that time. And so I sort of lost connection with his team. I wasn't really watching it very much. I was into lots of other things. And then I started working in a pub which showed all the football. And being a neutral as I was, I learned, you know, everything about, or everything to a pub level about every Premier League team. And for about three years, I think I could tell you off the top of my head, like the first 11 players in every Premier League team which I don't think I've been able to do for the last five years. And I developed much more of an interest in it and then I started to meet other people who were interested in it too. And I met people like Alex Stewart who brought me in through a slightly more niche interest angle into football instead of just the mainstream one. And so I would say my origin story is, you know, having a love for something which was really just because it was part of the connection between me and my dad, it was part of our relationship, losing that for a period of time and then rediscovering it through these other ways, but on my own terms, in ways that kind of intellectually interested me. And so I would say that's my origin story really. I'm being connected to people who feel deeply emotional about it without me feeling deeply emotional about it. It's a interesting experience. Like you learn a lot about people, I think, based on how they feel about the football team, how they act about it and how grumpy they are the next day when they lose. So I've got a lot of love and respect for football as a sport, as a kind of concept. But yeah, I think I needed to sort of approach it on my own terms to understand that properly. Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. What's your favorite piece of sport storytelling? Have you ever seen the documentary Paleo? No. No. So I can't remember. I wish I could remember the director, but it came out in maybe in 2016. steam, something like that. And it is about the horse race that takes place in Paleo, which is a town in Italy, where they just run around in a big circle. And it's one of the coolest documentaries I've ever seen. It's full of very complicated and what's the correct word, problematic themes and machismo and things that definitely don't, you know, cut today's mustard. I don't love the documentary because I agree with everything that's in it. I love it because it's a great expression of the people and of humanity. And also horses is just like the most cinematic thing ever, right? They look so cool in slow motion. And it's the horse, this particular horse race is a bareback horse race as well. So there's something really cool about watching people ride horses without saddles. It's very exciting. Yeah. Related question, what's a sports movie you forgot? You forgot? I mean, there's so many sport like football movies in particular are generally terrible, aren't they? I know that's a sort of common cliché talking point, but with I would say with the exception of the damn United, which I think is a very good film, I can't think of many good football films. I do always enjoy a guilty watch of goal. I don't know when the last time you watched goal was not long after it came out and not not since fun, really enough. It's good fun to watch what Americans think of people from Newcastle. You know, that's very I love that it's a sort of if Richard Curtis exclusively made movies in the Northeast, that's why I think goal would be sponsored heavily by Adidas. Yes. What say sports story you'd like to tell or you'd like to see someone else tell? I would like to see Adam Curtis tell any sports story. Oh, that would be interesting. Yeah. He's my favorite filmmaker. I adore everything about the way that I've made stuff and been trying to rip it off for years. So I would just love him to talk about sports and also I feel very sad if he did because then I think I can't do that anymore because you've done it now. It might be worth it though. And then for myself personally, I don't know. I feel as though I kind of reached an idea around Qatar 2022. That was that was I would say the peak of my interest in football was at that time. I found the storylines related to it so so fascinating. And some of the same themes and storylines today leave me a bit fatigued. So I don't know. Maybe it would just be something a bit more a bit more run of the mill. I'm working on a project at the moment with Jonathan Wilson, which is about the whole history of football. Something that T-Fo's never we've kind of done it by virtue of releasing a thousand videos about the history of football, but we've never really done it chronologically. And so we're working on that together at the moment. I feel very enthusiastic about it. I think that will be very fun for people who both knew to the sport and also people who already experienced fans. That'll be fun, bingeable series. Yeah. Well, we'll look forward to that and look out for it. But I think our time is up today. Joe's been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Outlines is an original production from 2640.