Even sport-haters love Bob Mortimer and Andy Dawson’s cult football podcast – which isn’t really about football at all ...
If you were starting a podcast, and your intention was to choose a subject matter that alienates as many people as it attracts, you would be hard-pressed to beat football. To some, the beautiful game is a thrilling weekly clash of the titans; to others, an endless parade of stats, inexplicable fortunes and stultifying punditry. Athletico Mince is the hen’s teeth of football podcasts, in that it has managed to cross that picket line: its listenership comprises equal numbers of football fans and non-fans alike. The reasons for this are simple: no other football podcast is co-hosted by comedy legend and near-as-damn-it national treasure Bob Mortimer, and Athletico Mince is the only football podcast that isn’t actually about football at all.
“I was looking at the logo for the podcast and I realised it’s still got two fucking footballs on it,” says its co-creator and co-host Andy Dawson. “Why have we not had them removed? Because it is not a football thing!” He’s right: it wouldn’t be unfair to say that no one has ever listened to Athletico Mince to learn anything about football. There is no analysis, or debate about a team’s form or a player’s performance. “I can remember giving an opinion on the first or second podcast about [former Manchester City midfielder] Yaya Touré,” says Mortimer. “And I heard myself doing it, and I thought: ‘You wanker’. And from then it changed pretty quickly.” “By episode five, it had become what it is now,” adds Dawson. “It’s got people from the world of football in it, but they don’t do ‘football stuff’.”
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