33 years ago, James Richardson’s life changed forever. Born in Bristol, England, Richardson spent the bulk of his childhood in England apart from brief spells in Lebanon and Kuwait.
Initially more interested in rugby than football, Richardson bought a satellite dish in 1989 and started watching Italian football as well as the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. He then started dating a girl from Rome, causing him to start supporting Roma (an affinity that has lasted until today) and start learning Italian, eventually becoming fluent.
This, combined with brief experience in TV production, prompted British free-to-air public broadcaster Channel 4 to hire him as a producer for its innovative new program, Football Italia.
Initially hired to serve as a hands-on producer who could help manage Paul Gascoigne, England’s preeminent footballing talent and who had just left Tottenham Hotspur for Lazio, Richardson was forced to step up and emerge as the main star of the show when Gascoigne started to miss his appointments with regularity. This allowed him to establish himself as the voice and face of Italian football for millions of staunch English viewers, spending a decade in Italy and translating his abundant passion to his audience. Three decades later, and Richardson has staked his claim as one of the top sports presenters in the game alongside the likes of Dave Johnson, Kate Scott and Jim Nantz. And whilst he’s mainly made his bread and butter with football, he’s also branched into lesser-known sports like sumo, cycling and darts as well as niche competitions like The World’s Strongest Man or The Great Model Railway Challenge.
“The thing I like most about sport is the stories about the people behind the sport or in the sport. It doesn’t matter too much to me whether they’re sitting on a bike or kicking a football,” stated Richardson in an exclusive Joy News interview. “I was somebody who worked in TV and who had an opportunity to go from being a production person to host a show about Italian football, which I was already interested in, but I didn’t come from a football background. I really like hosting, I really like making shows, I really like doing podcasts, whatever it is. So whether the subject matter is World’s Strongest Man, or football or cycling, or whatever, it really doesn’t matter that much if you just enjoy stories, which is what I really like more than anything. I also really enjoy the fact that when we do World’s Strongest Man, it’s so different to football. For a start, the access is total, everybody’s just there, happy to talk, there’s none of the issues that you might have around trying to talk to footballers, certainly with English clubs.
And the other thing is that you go away for one week, and that’s it. You don’t have to spend too much time thinking about it, whereas with football, football’s so relentless, it just goes on all the time, and there’s always more football. So, it’s really nice just to get a week off to go and do World’s Strongest Man and not think about football and instead just watch people pick up logs and pull buses and other essential stuff.”
Richardson returned to London in 2002, where he has remained ever since, presenting Eurosport live coverage of Serie A before anchoring Bravo TV’s Football Italia Live as well as the reboot of Gazzetta Football Italia. But when the Calciopoli scandal and the simultaneous rise of the Premier League caused Serie A to be left in the dust, Richardson was forced to end his Football Italia journey at the end of 2006 after 14 years. He co-presented Setanta Sports’ The Friday Football Show and Football Matters shows with Rebecca Lowe between 2007 and 2009 before enjoying a brief stint with BBC’s Late Kick Off for the South West region, followed by a chapter with ESPN’s Italian football coverage. He then presented ESPN’s coverage of live Italian football before moving to BT Sport (now TNT Sports) in 2013, where he hosted live Serie A matches and the Sunday night round-up show, European Football Show, until 2017, in addition to the UEFA Champions League Goals Show, whilst he also hosted the Fantasy Premier League Show by Premier League Productions. And this past summer, he was sent to the United States as a member of the joint DAZN / 5 presentation team for their coverage of the first-ever 32-team FIFA Club World Cup.
Richardson has enjoyed plenty of success throughout his career, like in September 2024 when, alongside James Horncastle, he was bestowed the honor of “Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy” by Italy’s UK ambassador for promoting Italian football and strengthening the cultural ties between England and Italy. And whilst he still has plenty of desire to live in Italy again, he’s more than comfortable in London.
“I have a partner, and she lives somewhere nearby…she goes to a different school, as they say in England. “My son’s staying with me at the moment. He’s finished college and is working in London as well. I’m mostly busy here in London, most of the work that I do ever since I moved back to the UK in 2002 has been based here. I mean, there are so many different channels in London…sometimes I’m off filming in Italy or a different place, but mostly, I’m here in London.”
Today, Richardson spends the majority of his time hosting The Totally Football Show, which was incorporated into The Athletic’s podcast network in 2020, where he masterfully weaves together a number of subjects and discusses the latest in football alongside veteran journalists like Raphael Honigstein, Julien Laurens, and Alvaro Romeo. Whether it’s analyzing Xabi Alonso’s start to life at Real Madrid, or Adam Buksa’s stellar displays at Udinese, or the potential title race in the Premier League, there isn’t a single topic that he shies away from. At nearly 60 years of age, Richardson has done just about everything there is to do in the industry, but one thing he hasn’t done is match commentary.
“I could never be a commentator. Although my first job in television was doing play-by-play commentary on an American football match in Europe, because I was really into American football, I couldn’t commentate on a football match. With the podcast, we do one on a Sunday night, straight off the back of the Saturday afternoon Premier League games, but by and large, we’ve got a lot of time to read, assimilate, and think a little bit more about what’s just happened. I really appreciate that because for most of my career, I was doing live games on television, where you coming up with an instant take, and when you are as tone-deaf about football as I am, you can get that wrong pretty easily. So, it is definitely nice to be able to have a slightly more considered take on the podcast on what’s going on….I don’t want to be a commentator, thank you very much.”