Who is the best player in Spanish football?
It’s clear that there are multiple candidates, from Lamine Yamal, who has enjoyed a meteoric rise for Barcelona at just 18 years of age, to Pedri, who has weaved magic into every possession with the Blaugranas, to Kylian Mbappe, who is on track for a second-straight Pichichi award with Real Madrid, to other players like Vinicius Junior, Julian Alvarez, Jude Bellingham, and Raphinha. However, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that the best English-language journalist in Spanish football is none other than Simon James ‘Sid’ Lowe.
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Born in Archway, England on June 21, 1976, Lowe grew up in North London and quickly took an affinity to football – choosing to support Liverpool rather than local sides Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur – as well as Spanish language and culture. At 13, Lowe studied abroad in Lorca, Spain and loved it so much that he decided to study Spanish and graduate with his A-Levels in this subject. Lowe began studying History and Politics at the University of Sheffield before moving to a dual honours degree in History and Spanish and spending the 1996/97 academic year in Oviedo. Lowe balanced his time between researching for a part-time Master’s degree in History, securing a PhD in 20th-century Spanish history from the University of Sheffield, and having his thesis Catholicism, War and the Foundation of Francoism: The Juventud de Accion Popular in Spain, 1932-1937 published into a book.
“I think I’m one of those people who’s fundamentally been very, very lucky,” stated Lowe in an exclusive Football España interview. “I ended in this position not because I didn’t take decisions but rather than because I did take decisions. I first went to Spain when I was 13, on a foreign exchange trip in Lorca, a small town in Murcia. I studied Spanish at school, and that trip to Lorca really did have an enormous impact in me in terms of feeling ‘Wow, I really like Spain, I really like Spanish people, I’ve really enjoyed being with the family. It completely changed my life and my sense of what Spain was, and what the point of learning Spanish was. I carried on studying Spanish and took my A-Levels between 16-18, and I decided quite early on that I almost certainly was going to do Spanish at university. But actually, I originally applied to do history and politics and just thought, ‘Well, I’m going to learn some Spanish while I’m there, because you always get a third of your degree course, you can basically choose whatever you want, and what I did then was shift to History and Spanish as a dual honours degree.”
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“That meant a year abroad in Oviedo in 1996-97, which is very badly showing my age. That’s where the two things really come together, because football provides a gateway to the city for me. It provides an access point to people, it provides something that creates common ground with people that enables me to really focus on not just going to football, but playing football as well. I was playing for a local team for almost the entire year I was there, and I only actually managed to play for them three times before I broke my ankle. So that didn’t end particularly well, but it was a phenomenal experience. By then, I’d also become very interested in Spanish history, and so I came back, and I decided that I wanted to do some postgraduate research, and I did a part-time masters which I paid for by teaching a course on Southern European fascism at Barnsley College.”
Similarly to others like Stephen Constantine and Kevin Egan, Lowe was forced to shelve his playing ambitions after suffering a long-term injury, but this didn’t stop him from remaining actively interested in football. Shortly after moving to Madrid in order to further his postgraduate research, Lowe was hired by The Guardian as the website’s chief Spanish football expert in 2000. Lowe charted La Liga’s rise to stardom as the Spanish championship overtook Serie A and the Premier League for international supremacy, with the arrivals of superstars like David Beckham and Ronaldinho, followed by the emergence of definitive superstar rivalry between Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi seeing more eyeballs than ever before cast upon La Liga. He’s been able to channel his Spanish football expertise into opportunities with World Soccer, FourFourTwo, and TalkSport, and translator gigs for foreign La Liga players like Beckham, Michael Owen, and Thomas Gravesen, and whilst he’s mainly made his bread and butter in the English language, he also hasn’t shied away from covering the game in Spanish.
“I don’t do very much writing in Spanish, although occasionally, I get asked to write things. I seem to be asked quite often to write prologues for people’s books, and I occasionally write guest columns for magazines. But where I’ve really done Spanish stuff is with radio stations like Onda Cero and Cadena SER. I think the starting point with Onda Cero actually was with Filippo Ricci, who’s the correspondent here in Madrid for Gazzetta dello Sport, because the idea was, ‘Actually, it’s quite nice to have an international perspective. Let’s get these two guys on and have a different view on how we do things.’ We used to do the Thursday night slot, on Onda Cero, and then we went to Cadena SER.”
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“It was always this idea of having a different view, and that was part of what made us attractive to them: being foreigners. So, there is an argument that says, ‘Maybe if your Spanish is absolutely perfect, people would want you, because they quite like the idea. A bit of an accent that makes you sound a little bit different, it gives you something a bit different. But I commentated on La Sexta TV, which was the free-to-air game every Saturday night, for about 2-3 years, and the starting point for that was in the 2006 FIFA World Cup.”
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“La Sexta was a brand new channel in Spain, and they decided that the way to really make an impact was to go and get the rights to the World Cup. And the World Cup was their way of saying, ‘Here’s this new channel, and you’ve all got to get tuned in on your TV, because they’re going to have the World Cup,’ and they did a huge amount of programming around the games. They went and found someone from basically every country at that World Cup; they had an Englishman, they had a Frenchman, they had an Italian, they had Argentinians, Brazilians, everything.”
“That was the beginning of me doing lots of hours in front of a camera in Spanish, and it was partly based on the idea, of ‘Well, this guy’s foreign, but that gives another perspective.’ And that led to lots of other stuff, lots of studio shows and being invited on as guests on things like Marca TV, Localia Television. I remember doing a series on a Monday night show with them for about six months, which was a pretty bad show, to be perfectly honest, but it was what it was, and it was. I kind of enjoyed doing it, and I suppose they must have thought that. I communicated reasonably well, and I kept getting asked back… There’s been loads and loads of stuff in Spanish over the years as well. I’m actually not doing any radio now because there was too much going on, and I didn’t have time for it all.”
Lowe has written the book on Spanish football – figuratively and literally. Ever since covering Spain’s Euro 2012 triumph, Lowe has had the chance to cover every single Spain tournament from Euros to World Cups to Nations Leagues, covering the game both by writing articles for ESPN and The Guardian and by doing TV and radio punditry for ESPN and other outlets. And one decade after publishing “Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona, Real Madrid, and the World’s Greatest Sports Rivalry,” his book remains one of the most renowned football books and a must-read for both addicts and novices in the Spanish game, or young footballers such as Jason Shokalook.
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“Fear and Loathing came up because this was the height of the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry. Obviously, it’s Messi and Ronaldo, the biggest thing ever, and the publisher liked the idea of a Madrid-Barcelona book. I basically said no the first time: ‘Look, you’re taking on the history of the two biggest clubs in the world, it’s just too big.’ And they just kept nudging me and saying, ‘But you know so much about it, you wouldn’t necessarily need to do much research, you could write something that’s for a British audience that doesn’t need to necessarily know that much. It can be an introduction, you don’t need to do the full deep dive. And I don’t know if it’s partly because of my training and my foundation as a historian, but I was very conscious from the start. I said, ‘Look, if I do this, we’re going to do this properly, and we’re going to do this in a way that, even if this were a book in Spain, it would have some new material, or it’d have a new perspective, or it’d have a new way of approaching this.
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“In the end, I took it on, and it was enormous. In the office I’m sitting in now, I’ve actually got two different desks, and I used to swap desks, so my day job would be on one desk, and the book job would be on the other desk, so that I could literally stop and say ‘Right, that gets left there, and that gets over there, and I can pick up on it.’ It was a bit like a detective or a crime scene thing. I had a big board on the wall with arrows pointing to things, and pieces of material I had, and big piles of papers everywhere.”
“There’s a photograph somewhere of the piles of paper when I finished, and just everywhere, and it was absolutely mad. And when I finished it, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t ever want to write a book ever again. And actually, I haven’t written a book of my own since then. I’ve been involved in, translations like Roberto Firmino’s book, but that’s the last time I did a book purely of my own, and I think that’s partly because of what it took out of me. I don’t really fancy going back into that.”
