De meest interessante voetbalpodcast van het moment. Simon Kuper en Mehreen Khan nemen een held, en maken er een mens van. Dat leidt tot fascinerende verhalen waarin voetbal dient ter verheldering van maatschappelijke en historische ontwikkelingen. Neem de aflevering over Hakan Sukur, de grootste Turkse voetballer ooit die nu, verketterd, als Uber-chauffeur rondrijdt door Californië.
Listen to the stories behind football’s biggest names, hosted by Simon Kuper and Mehreen Khan.
“Hosts Simon Kuper and Mehreen Khan know their stuff.” – The Guardian
“The most interesting football podcast of the moment.” – NRC, a leading Dutch daily
Heroes & Humans moves beyond the traditional boundaries of sports commentary to explore the lives of football’s most interesting figures. Whether episodes are about Messi, Abramovich, Cruyff, Şükür or Haaland, this is the go-to podcast for football audio-biographies. Released once weekly on Thursdays.
Simon Kuper, acclaimed by Time Magazine as “one of the world’s leading writers on soccer,” and an awarded Financial Times columnist, brings a three-decade career of interviewing and understanding the personalities that define the world’s greatest sport. Having attended the last nine World Cups and boasting Europe’s largest football library, Simon’s insights are rooted in a profound depth of knowledge and passion for football.
Mehreen Khan, whose day job is as the Economics Editor at The Times, believes football is a “brilliant shortcut in how to understand societies, economies, and politics”. She is a football obsessive and die-hard Chelsea fan. With her ability to intertwine socio-political narratives with pop culture savvy, Mehreen stands out in the football podcasting landscape. Her presence as one of the few female voices adds a valuable dimension, broadening the conversation for listeners.
Mehreen was previously the FT’s Brussels correspondent, before moving to The Times in 2022. She started her career in sports journalism at the Daily Telegraph in 2014, and wrote a football blog that touched on themes including Russia’s breakaway Muslim separatism, German multiculturalism, and the earth-shattering magnificence of Andrea Pirlo.
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What happens when your greatest moment becomes both a blessing and a burden? This is not just the story of Geoff Hurst’s World Cup hat-trick but a deeper exploration of a vanishing era of English football and the often-challenging lives of the heroes of ’66 after their moment of glory.
In this episode, Simon and Mehreen uncover the complex legacy of England’s World Cup-winning team through the eyes of its last surviving member. From modest wages and part-time jobs to the devastating impact of dementia on his teammates, Hurst’s story reveals how differently football treated its heroes in the 1960s. They explore how these working-class heroes navigated life after football in an era before mega-contracts and media careers and how many struggled to find their place in the modern world.
Time stamps:
0:00: Introduction and the last survivor
04:15: Football in the 1960s—a different world
08:32: Working-class heroes and modest lifestyles
12:45: The road to the World Cup team
17:23: That day at Wembley
23:41: Life immediately after the victory
28:56: The struggle to adjust to normal life
34:18: Financial hardships of the ’66 team
39:27: The dementia crisis—losing teammates one by one
45:33: Bobby Moore’s difficult later years
51:19: The forgotten stories of the other players
56:44: Part-time jobs and post-football careers
1:02:38: The burden of being forever ’66
1:08:15: Modern football vs. the amateur era
1:13:27: Preserving the memory of a vanishing generation
1:18:52: What modern football can learn from ’66
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Visit our website for news & updates heroesandhumans.com
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