Simon Cooper
speaker
334 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Simon Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And in England, I never had the ball because the ball would just fly over your head both ways.
And I realized every country really is raised with a completely different way of playing football.
And it turned out that the Dutch way was the winning way.
It later spread to Spain and Germany in particular, now to England.
And those countries have bigger talent pools.
So now they beat the Dutch.
Yeah, so Jules Rimet, people will know the name, and it's in the English football song, Three Lions, Football's Coming Home.
Jules Rimet's still gleaming.
That refers to that first World Cup trophy.
It was named after him, stolen in Brazil in 1983, never seen again, and now the World Cup is a kind of less glamorous, less pretty object.
So who was Julien?
Nobody knew.
Nobody I ever spoke to had any sense of him.
I didn't either when I started the book.
And I thought, I looked for the sources.
They're all in French.
Okay, I live in France, speak French.
So I thought, I'm going to figure out who this bloke was.
And I go out and I cycle out an hour out of Paris to his grave.
It was in a municipal cemetery, family grave.
Showing 101–120 of 334 · page 6 of 17
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