Joel Rookwood

Yeah, thanks very much, John.

I feel like a long-time listener, first-time caller.

It's good to be on the show.

So obviously, as you mentioned, Dan's written a couple of books.

He's written The European Game and Local, and both of those books did really well.

Dan actually, he was a student of mine, so this is making me feel pretty old.

And we went on a trip together in Barcelona.

It was a university trip for a degree I was running that he was on.

And I was interviewed by...

a journalist who's he's a kind of tv journalist but does some written work as well and we were discussing our cities him being from barcelona obviously himself from liverpool and i just described barcelona as a football city and he just said what's a football city

And it was like a light bulb went off.

I was like, what a great question.

So I suppose this book is an attempt to answer that question.

And Dan and I, it took us a long time, but we set about formulating a list of cities.

So there's 22 cities that we've...

come up with which we feel are an encapsulation of football places and I think you know you're in a football city when you go to one you've been on European aways you've travelled a lot yourself and when you're in a place you can tell when football feels a bit peripheral where it doesn't really matter and you can tell when it really does and we're trying to

give voice to the places that feel like football cities.

And it's not just written by us.

So there's 22 authors from each city.

And this book gives an insider insight into what football means in those places.