Gabriele Marcotti Reflects on Three Decades of Legendary Journalistic Career
Deep in the heart of central London, located between Chelsea Football Club’s Stamford Bridge and Fulham Football Club’s Craven Cottage, there is a man who rarely shouts, but whose voice resonates throughout the entire footballing world. A man whose surname is Italian, whose accent is American, whose upbringing spanned three different continents, and who, three decades after launching his career, has cemented his status as one of the greatest football journalists in the entire industry: Gabriele Marcotti.
Born on July 28, 1973, Marcotti spent the first few years of his life in Milan, Italy, before bouncing around the globe on account of his father’s job with an international bank, with stops in Warsaw, Poland, and Frankfurt, Germany, as well as sprawling metropolises like New York City, Tokyo, London, and Chicago. Having briefly attended the European School, Varese in Varese, Italy, Marcotti returned to the United States and started a new academic chapter in the City of Brotherly Love, where he developed a lifelong affinity for the NFL franchise Philadelphia Eagles. Marcotti graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania before heading to New York to complete his postgraduate studies and earn a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
Establishing a Reputation in London
As Marcotti embarked on his higher education in the USA, global football went through a sea change. The breakaway FA Premier League was launched in 1992, backed up by a five-year, £304 million deal with Sky to televise Premier League matches, replacing the First Division as England’s top-flight. Three years later, the Bosman ruling banned quota restrictions on foreign EU players within national leagues, and allowed players in the EU to move to another club at the end of a contract without a transfer fee being paid and without the approval of the previous club. It’s why, upon graduating in 1996, Marcotti decided against returning to his birthplace, which boasted the strongest league in the world and the biggest stars in the game. Instead, he made the move to London, where he has remained ever since, watching closely as the Premier League surpassed Serie A for the most prestigious league in club football. Little did he know it, but he was setting the foundations for a legendary career that has seen him cover four World Cups, three European Championships, as well as 12 UEFA Champions League finals and other competitions like the Summer Olympics and Copa América.
“So much of this business is timing. I was extremely fortunate because the Premier League was only born a couple of years earlier, and the Bosman Rule revolutionized so many different things. Obviously, that got rid of the limit on foreigners per team, so players from all over the world started moving around, and many of them came to England. Money started pouring into the Premier League that wasn’t there before, and I was in the right place at the right time,” stated Marcotti in an exclusive R.Org interview. “Cell phones had just become widespread at the time, and all you could do was call people….I don’t even know if you could text on them back then, but you could call up players who didn’t know you, and they would answer the phone, because it was like a novelty: ‘Hey, look, I got a phone call, hello?’ That’s when I started reporting, and I was very fortunate to be in that situation, because that’s when I made a lot of contacts and built a lot of relationships that still serve me to this day.”
Marcotti initially started freelancing for the British newspapers Daily Mail and Financial Times as well as writing a column for American magazine Sports Illustrated’s online section, before getting his first big break after being hired to write features for the Scottish outlet The Sunday Herald. He was able to advance his journalistic career not just as a writer, but as a pundit after being hired as a Serie A correspondent by the United Kingdom’s main sports radio network (Talksport) in 2001 as part of the Football First in Europe team alongside Premier League expert Adrian Durham, LaLiga expert Guillem Balague, Bundesliga expert Raphael Honigstein, and Ligue 1 expert Xavier Rivoire. Eventually, this would materialize in his first full-time writing gig with The Times, which brought him on board in 2003.
“When I started out, I didn’t want to be a sportswriter: I wanted to be one of those guys who writes 4 or 5 long articles per year for the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal and has a big expense account, although I’m not even sure those jobs still exist. Through some friends, I was able to start freelance reporting in the late ‘90s for the Daily Mail, which paid well. But I think what put me over the top was two things: 1) There was a new paper being launched in Scotland called the Sunday Herald, and they wanted somebody to write European football, which allowed me to start writing features. Rather than a 300-word piece about Arsenal signing Robert Pirès, I could write a feature about Pirès or Thierry Henry, or whatever. That really was a game-changer because I was able to showcase my writing in English, which then gave me clips to show people that I could write in a way that was interesting and knowledgeable.”
“Around the same time, the UK’s national sports talk radio station Talksport had a show called Football First in Europe, where it was slightly paint-by-the-numbers, and we would come on and talk about what was happening in European football, which gave me a lot of broadcasting confidence and expanded my contacts and my network. Between that and my writing for the Sunday Herald, I had clips, I had stuff I could show, and when Simon Kuper left The Times of London in 2003, he recommended me to replace them. They took a chance on me, and I ended up working for them for 12/13 years. I launched my podcast over there, and things really took off from there.”
Launching his Literary Career
After six years with Talksport, Marcotti made the switch to Radio 5 Live, co-presenting the Friday edition of 5 Live Sport alongside Mark Pougatch and previewing the weekend’s Premier League fixtures as well as a select few European matches, before moving to the Sunday night 6-0-6 program. Whilst Marcotti has made London his home over the entirety of his professional career, he has nevertheless remained keenly devoted to covering Serie A and the latest happenings in Italian football. Whether discussing the latest scandal to send shockwaves through Italy or breaking down the Scudetto race or zeroing in on a new arrival from Italy, Marcotti’s tact and knowledge about Serie A have catapulted him to fame and allowed him to be invited onto programs like Sky Sports News and BBC’s Football Focus.
Fluent in both English and Italian, Marcotti previously worked as a columnist for the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa, but today, he serves as the London correspondent for the Italian sports daily newspaper Corriere dello Sport. Marcotti hasn’t just tapped into his bilingualism to advance his journalistic career – he’s also used it to embark on a literary career. After co-authoring the 1999 autobiography of Paolo Di Canio, who split his playing career between England and Italy, Marcotti worked with ex-Juventus and Chelsea striker Gianluca Vialli to produce the 2006 book “The Italian Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures,” which was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
When legendary Italian manager Fabio Capello took charge of the English national team, Marcotti produced an unauthorized biography – “Capello: The Man Behind England’s World Cup Dream” – which was nominated for the National Sporting Club’s British Sports Book of the Year award in the Football category. Six years later, when Claudio Ranieri masterminded the greatest upset in modern football history by guiding Leicester City to the 2015/16 Premier League title, Marcotti worked alongside Alberto Polverosi and co-authored the book “Hail, Claudio! The Man, the Manager, the Miracle.” And when Vialli braced for his untimely demise from pancreatic cancer, he picked Marcotti to be his translator and produce the 2020 book “Goals: Inspirational Stories to Help Tackle Life’s Challenges.”
“Goals was Gianluca Vialli’s last book before he passed away. It’s different from the others as it’s a series of inspirational stories about sports, which afforded him inspiration as he went on this journey with cancer before his passing. The Di Canio, Capello, and Ranieri books all focused on a person, but they’re all very different in the sense that I ghost-wrote Di Canio’s autobiography, and as anybody who follows him will know, he is a very unusual and unique character, and I spent an enormous amount of time with him. Fabio Capello was an unauthorized biography, but as often happens with unauthorized biographies, if you are the subject, and especially if you’re Capello, an intelligent guy who knows that he’s rubbed more than a few people the wrong way in his career, you realize ‘I’m not going to authorize this book, but I will talk to them, because I want to set the story straight on certain things and make sure my version of events is in the story, and then people can decide.”
“It’s amazing how different people in the room remember the same incident differently. One of my mentors was a legendary English writer named Brian Glanville, and if you read some of his books where he’s describing World Cup games from the 1960s and 1970s, and you read his descriptions of the goal, and then you can go on YouTube, and you can see that they played out completely differently than how he remembered them in the book. My book about Ranieri, of course, was really focused on Ranieri, but it also centered on Leicester winning the title in 2015-16, one of the greatest underdog stories in the history of sport. Writing a book takes a lot out of you: I think it’s the closest a male will ever come to giving birth, which is still very far away from the female experience, but I think that’s as close as we’re going to come.”
Setting the Journalistic Standard at ESPN
More than just Italy, Marcotti constantly has his finger on the pulse of Europe’s major leagues, serving as a commentator on ITV’s UEFA Champions League highlights show and a writer for Champions Magazine. He has also made his mark in the podcasting industry, replacing Danny Kelly as the host of The Times’ podcast The Game in August 2007 alongside Balagué and serving as both a presenter and a guest until leaving The Times in 2019. He’s also served as a regular contributor to “Golazzo: The Totally Italian Football Show” for The Totally Football Show with James Richardson and James Horncastle and the Serie Awesome podcast with English commentator Mina Rzouki and The Guardian’s Nicky Bandini, as well as the U.S.-based football show Beyond the Pitch.
Today, Marcotti balances his time between writing for Corriere dello Sport, raising his two daughters with his wife, and working with the worldwide leader in sport: ESPN. Having started freelancing for them in 2012, Marcotti became a full-time staff writer for ESPN in 2015 and works both as a written journalist, filing his weekly “Marcotti’s Musings” column every Monday, co-hosting The Gab and Juls podcast with French journalist Julien Laurens, and serving as a regular guest on ESPN FC’s television broadcasts.
“What’s been really interesting about my experience with ESPN is that it’s been like a melting pot where you don’t have a standard cultural footballing matrix. The Times is a British newspaper, Corriere dello Sport is a Roman newspaper, and that’s the way that they explain the world. ESPN is obviously an American company, but when it comes to talking football, the message for me has been to talk to everybody. That’s why they have people from all sorts of different cultures and backgrounds working there, which helps you distill what is really universal and helps you realize that a lot of built-in truisms or stereotypes that, to some degree, are cultural, that were maybe very real 20 or 30 years ago when I was growing up, and they’ve gone away now and moved on.
The game really is global: it used to be, English clubs were kick and rush and put the ball in the mixer, whereas German clubs were all about discipline, and Italian clubs were all about stout defending and counterattacking, and Spanish clubs were about playing pretty football, but ultimately were a bunch of lightweights who always crapped themselves. You start to realize that’s all nonsense, you realize that the game has gone so far beyond that. There are still some local characteristics, sometimes local dysfunctions, but I think that the leagues that are better-run tend to be the most diverse leagues. One of the Premier League’s big strengths is the diversity of ownership, the diversity of talents in terms of players, but also in terms of executives and best practices.”
“ESPN has been tremendously rewarding. In terms of how I write at ESPN, I try to hit both the casual fan who wanders onto the soccer page by mistake, because they’re looking for SEC results or something, and also the die-hard fan who spends his life on some Manchester United app. You have to write to both, and that’s been something which has really afforded me quite an education.
Equally, when I wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal for a bunch of years, I had to write to people and assume they knew nothing, I had to explain everything. And that’s been very good, because you can sometimes get stuck in the nitty-gritty and make a lot of assumptions about what your audience already knows, and this forces you to take a step back.”