Correspondents
Graham Hunter
Born in Aberdeen, Graham Hunter is a veteran of several World Cups since 1982 and a writer for the Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Sunday Herald, Kick Off South Africa SportsCN Shanghai and a broadcaster for Sky, BBC Radio, Gol Tv in Spain, Newstalk 105 in Ireland and, of course, WSD. He is the Uefa.com correspondent for FC Barcelona, Villarreal, Sevilla, Valencia and at Euro 2008 the Spanish national team.
Graham is happiest when knee-deep in Champions League or La Liga football or when Aberdeen win a game.
Misha Sher
Born in Ukraine and raised in Dynamo Kiev’s academy, Misha has been around football his entire life. As a director at Soccerex, London based football agency, Misha is truly at the heart of everything that happens on the business side of the football. When he is not mixing with the movers and shakers of the game, he writes for ‘The League’ magazine, presents for Derby County’s TV Channel and of course chips in with WSD. From TV Rights to foreign ownership to credit crunch, Misha regularly covers the biggest stories taking place off the field, having appeared on Fox Soccer Channel, Bloomberg, ESPN Star Sport, SuperSport, and SABC to name a few.
He has followed Man Utd since Andrey Kanchelskis moved there in 1991 but Dynamo Kiev is the club closest to his heart.
Kris Voakes
Having worked for Barnsley FC’s matchday radio station whilst training as a journalist, Kris spent two and a half years in the production and reporting ranks at talkSPORT radio. In late 2008, having spent far too long bemoaning the lack of UK coverage of his increasingly beloved Serie A, he took the bull by the horns and decided to move out to Milan.
Besides World Soccer Daily, Kris can be heard weekly on Italian Football Fancast and read on Italian Calcio Blogspot. He can also be seen “working” at Serie A and B grounds all over Italy each weekend.
South America: Tim “Vickipedia” Vickery
The son of a reasonably skilled amateur footballer, Tim Vickery inherited all of the enthusiasm and none of the talent. But the game helped to hone his literary skills; despite never making it out of England until his mid-20s he could spell Czechoslovakia (a sadly redundant skill these days) by the age of 7 – all based on the fact that they had made it to two World Cup finals.
Since 1994 he has been based in Brazil, and he covers South American football for the BBC, World Soccer magazine, Sports Illustrated and SBS in Australia.
Europe: Andy Brassell
Andy Brassell is a freelance writer and broadcaster on European football. He is resident European football expert on BBC FiveLive Up All Night’s World Football show, and has contributed to a number of other radio shows, magazines, websites and television programmes whilst covering football all over the continent. The author of ‘All Or Nothing; A season in the life of the Champions League’, Andy speaks four languages and lives in Lyon, France with his wife and their pet Valencian bat, JoaquÃn.
England: Bobby McMahon
Bobby McMahon is a correspondant for Fox Soccer Report, and covers primarily the Premierhsip for World Soccer Daily. He joined Fox Soccer Report in September 2001 and started writing a weekly column for FoxSoccer.com on MSN in August 2004.
Bobby fell in love with football at the age of four. He played at the school and youth level, before going on to play for Tayport, then one of Scotland’s top amateur teams, and was selected for a Scottish Amateurs team trial. He also had a brief spell at the junior level. (Junior football is a unique Scottish institution, one step below the Scottish League structure, with no age restrictions.)
A life-long Dundee supporter my greatest memories relate to Dundee winning the Scottish League in the sixties and their European adventures thereafter. Although I find it difficult to admit, I also fondly remember Dundee United beating Barcelona and Juventus around the same time. My greatest football thrill however, was attending my first Scotland-England game at Hampden Park, Glasgow, with nearly 130,000 close personal friends and two Englishmen in attendance.
Germany: Johannes Berendt
Johannes Berendt is not just the “happiest German” as Steven calls him, but also a correspondent for the Press Association. He has written about soccer ever since the age of 17 and quite frankly, there’s probably nothing else he could do. Covered the World Cup for PA and has started to eat Italian food again. Hopes for his local team Arminia Bielefeld to play in the Champions League one day. Visited Nick and Steven on one of their first FFF shows.
Italy: Massimo Lopes Pegna
Massimo Lopes Pegna, born in Florence, Italy in 1959, has been the U.S. Correspondent for La Gazzetta dello Sport, one of the most widely read daily sports newspapers in the world, for the past 18 years.
Before that he played calcio in a small youth team in Florence, wearing the number 3 and dreaming of becoming one day like Giacinto Facchetti. But Massimo’s coach always stopped him at the midfield line, telling him it was his ‘trench’ – in Italy Defense always wins the game.
Massimo has been supporting Fiorentina since he was born, through the good times and the bad. Though, to his disappointment, there have been more bad times than good.
Spain: Phil Ball
Phil Ball is an Englishman who has lived in the north of Spain since 1991. He is the author of ‘Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football’, and ‘White Storm: The Story of Real Madrid’, both of them firsts in the English language. He has also written ‘An Englishman Abroad’ which deals with Beckham’s first year in Spain, and has written a weekly column on ESPN’s ‘Soccernet’ site for the last seven years. A diehard supporter of Grimsby Town, who reside in the nether regions of the English league, he dedicates himself to relatively trivial pursuits in his spare time, such as working as a University lecturer and writing educational materials for the autonomous Basque Government. He has also written a comedy entitled ‘The Hapless Teacher’s Handbook’, and is currently working on a new book about the 1st Gulf War, in which he accidentally participated.
Turkey: Oguz Bugra Demirbag “Bura”
Bura fell in love with football in Turkey, although he currently resides in Sheffield. He has been a regular contributor to the BBC’s World Football Phone In show, and during Euro 2008, he wrote a column for Gözcü, a football newspaper in Turkey. He supports Leicester City FC in English football and Besiktas in Turkey.
United States: Sean Wheelock
A television broadcaster in Major League Soccer since the league’s inaugural season of 1996, Sean Wheelock has served as the host of “MLS Wrap” on Fox Soccer Channel, “MLS ExtraTime” on ESPN2, and as the voice of the Kansas City Wizards. Sean’s television and radio soccer play by play experience also includes numerous MLS matches for ESPN/ESPN2 and Fox Soccer Channel, World Cup Qualifiers, US Open Cup, French League 1, Dutch Eredivise, USL, and NCAA Men’s and Women’s college soccer.
For the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Sean worked as a commentator for both XM Satellite Radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Aside from his television broadcasting work in the United States, Sean is the US and CONCACAF correspondent for BBC Radio in the UK. As part of his duties, Sean is a panelist on the weekly “World Football Phone-In” on BBC Radio 5, and a regular contributor to Radio 5’s “Five Live Sport” and to “World Football” and “Sports World” on BBC World Service. For the BBC, Sean has also written and narrated numerous documentaries on soccer, including one on America’s historic win versus England at the 1950 World Cup.
