Nate Gallant: Some people love trashy TV, soapy books, gimmicky burgers at themed pop-up restaurants in LA. Personally, I most enjoy podcasted garbage. I have no qualms with the educational or newsy podcast, but spending most of every day having to interact as responsibly as I can with text for work, I enjoy closing my eyes and turning on some absolute audio nonsense in the evening and then puttering around to walk the dog or cook. I love a podcast that offers little more than extemporaneous bullshit to hang around my tired head, sometimes from professional improvisers, but often not, usually about the most banal, broad topics, say, fast-food or or TV or just, nothing in particular. Some of this quasi-comedic rot is of a more consumable quality than others. Generally what makes the garbage most palatable, for me at least, is what I feel to be a shared melancholic relationship to reality â namely recognizing that sports or food or professional media or whatever weâre talking about is never immune from the politics of structural oppression. (That is to say, not Joe Rogan, but not quite dirtbag-left talk radio)
I do make a few exceptions from these fonts of straight nonsense, all for soccer, though none are exempt from slightly bro-y bullshit. Men in Blazersâ many offerings and The Guardianâs Football Weekly are well worth the listen both for the banter and the football analysis. But The Sweeper, available as both a free and subscriber only bonus form, is my favorite by a mile.
The Sweeper Pod is, to me, a superlative and well-designed use of the form of podcast media made globally accessible through low-level subscriptions (in this case Patreon), though financial sustainability is always hard to gauge. It is the project of Paul Watson, former semi-pro player, writer, and coach of several very far-flung football projects, and Lee Wingate, an experienced sports reporter in Austria and various other footballing arenas around the world. They plumb the fascinating depths of the global game for stories about little-known club teams, less powerful national soccer struggles, alt leagues, and former players doing very strange, but significant things. In the same way that a bunch of fools reviewing Chipotle nine times say, on the podcast Doughboys, could only make a living from a dedicated community of zealous, equally foolish listeners (myself included), the small-scale subscription model seems to be the only possible lifeblood of an English-language podcast about the state of the FA (Football Association, generally the national body controlling footballing affairs) in Gibraltar and news about a club team releasing a player in the third division of Turkey after seeing his Tinder profile. This obscurity is the selling point.
The show is assiduously researched by Watson and Wingate, who avail themselves of social mediaâs essential presence in the more obscure depths of sports news. Their networks are vast, impressive, and tight-knit. There appears to be genuine community on the Patreon-walled Discord server and little acerbic fandom â possibly from how little can be at stake, or, paradoxically, how much can be at stake for world footballâs underdogs. I loved their story on Bhutanâs Thimpu FC, one of its major capital city clubs with a strong environmentalist bent, though maybe my favorite story of late was the UEFA Regionsâ Cup, a league for âautochthonous regional minorities,'' as opposed to the nation-state driven competitions that dominated this summer in sports (Euros, Copa America, Olympics). Their coverage of this competition did its teams justice, but also highlighted complex issues in larger global soccer, say, the Spanish national menâs soccer team being driven by several Basque players. It was also great counter-programming to the ten-thousandth discussion in Anglophone media about who will play left-back for England or whether we all actually like Gareth Southgate.Â
That soccer, often a bitterly divisive force, made worse by those who talk about it professionally, can unite a small community through media about the farthest flung teams has been a joy to experience and learn from biweekly. To borrow from the soccer journalist Rory Smith, they, in a way, work hard to informatively ride the fine line, or even the very cutting edges, of âfootballâs globality.â Soccerâs history and continual renewal can sometimes, but not always, be contextualized as a complicated remnant of the British empire, from which soccer was exported in the early 20th century. Both the English language and football can offer broad access points from which to learn about the peregrinations of, say, Tuvaluâs political system â which I might never have learned about otherwise.
Kyle Chayka: Like Nate, I turn to podcasts as ambient entertainment more than anything. They offer audio background to otherwise mundane tasks; most often, Iâm not up to the labor of paying deep attention. (Except while cooking, which is apparently an ideal brain space in which to absorb other information.) As is also true for any IRL âreadingâ event, the best podcasts are, to some degree, funny. I canât deal with a podcast thatâs too serious, but I like knowing about serious things. Thus Iâve been enjoying Semaforâs new podcast, Mixed Signals. Itâs nominally about âmediaâ; Semafor founder and former NYT media columnist Ben Smith hosts, along with Nayeema Raza, who used to cohost one of Kara Swisherâs podcasts, and theyâre experts. But really itâs a quippy, gossipy, tightly edited series of chats about whatever theyâre interested in: business, politics, movies, TikTok. Their recent episode with Veep and Succession producer and media man about town Frank Rich discussing Kamala Harrisâs campaign launch was great.
On the beat of serious subjects treated lightly, the NYT art critic Jason Farago, who for my money is one of the best culture critics working today, went on a podcast called The Cluster F Theory, hosted by âTV presenter and writer Gia Milinovich and Timotheus Vermeulen, Professor of Media, Culture and Society.â Each episode takes a conceptual approach to some theme of Our Present Condition, and Farago focuses on cultural stasis, which was the subject of a long essay of his in NYT Mag. The chat is academic-y but also fun in an urbane intellectual way. Come for the complaints about JFK (classic podcast bit, airport analysis) and stay for the dissection of âvulgarity.âÂ
One Thingâs Podcast Canon
Quick links from this post.Â
Men in Blazers (soccer)
Football Weekly (soccer)
The Sweeper (soccer)
Doughboys (fast food)
Mixed Signals (media)Â
The Cluster F Theory (academia)