Diana, Football Royalty & Me

Friends with the finest footballers on the planet, a journalist, author and presenter, Barcelona-born Guillem Balague these days calls Hitchin home. At the Biggleswade club he is passionate about, Layth Yousif spoke to the engaging expert about his surprising career.

- Guillem Balague

IT’S NOT EVERYDAY the director of a football club picks you up from your house on a cold morning and happily drives you to its stadium to conduct the interview you’ve arranged. Nor is it commonplace for a hugely-respected and well-known broadcaster to make you a mug of tea and ask after your family once you get there. Or, that a journalist with nearly a million followers on Twitter mucks in by helping move a heavy table in the clubhouse before you sit down to talk.

But Herfordshire’s Guillem Balague is not your average football fan. In fact the Barcelona-born 46-year-old isn’t easy to categorise at all.

Guillem writes for Fleet Street broadsheets including The Times and Observer. He also appears as a pundit on Sky Sports’ Spanish football show Revista de la Liga and pens reports for top Madrid newspaper AS. If that wasn’t enough, he is the author of best-selling books on Liverpool FC, Pep Guardiola, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Oh, and he also makes time for his directorship of Biggleswade United in Bedfordshire.

So how did the Catalan end up in his adopted home of Hitchin, helping to run a club in the Spartan South Midlands League Premier Division?

At Biggleswade’s Second Meadow ground he says, ‘I arrived in Liverpool in 1991 after I’d finished my journalism course in Barcelona. I went to Liverpool through Erasmus – a pan-European student swap scheme – after my parents rented a room to a Liverpool lad. I said to him, “Can I come over and stay with you?” and he said, “Yes no problem”. I went for three months and ended up staying a year-and-a-half.’