A three-way title race – and something even bigger

Max Rushden with Football Weekly co-host Barry Glendenning

Dear reader,

It turns out you’ve read 394 Guardian articles this year, so while you’re here – give us all your money…

I know: it’s annoying when you’re on the Guardian website and that pops up when all you’re trying to do is find out the 10 things to look out for in the Premier League this weekend.

But the reason they ask is because only around 8% of readers of the Guardian’s website regularly support our journalism financially. Recently we learned that the Guardian Football Weekly podcast audience is the most loyal across the entire organisation. Stick that in your pipe, George Monbiot. However, we also discovered that our football audience is among the tightest.

While George’s followers – and those picking through Yotam Ottolenghi’s best mushroom recipes in Feast – generously understand that we are part of a bigger thing here, if you’re a Football Weekly listener you perhaps feel that you do your bit by simply not fast-forwarding me and Barry Glendenning’s latest attempt to flog you a mattress before the podcast starts.

But that’s not quite how it works: we don’t need transfer window levels of cash – but making three podcasts a week – alongside the rest of our news and sports coverage – is expensive. Basically, what we need from you is about £5 a month, or about 1/8,000,000th of a Nathan Aké. Surely we’re worth that? It’s not even a toenail.

To be fair to our audience, they put up with a lot (of me, and Barry) and they are a socially conscious lot, none more so when they made me question my own decisions on taking money from working with gambling companies. I still appreciate that, even if my bank balance doesn’t.

As a podcast we try to push ourselves to cover all the tricky parts of the game, the human rights abuses, the corruption, the seedy stuff. It might be surprising to hear that the bosses don’t trust us to get everything right legally - so there’s also a team of lawyers on hand to listen to Philippe Auclair’s latest rant on [redacted] and make us broadcastable. The podcast has been going for nearly 20 years now. It feels like a family, we listen to and face up to criticism – we love meeting our ultras during the live tours (below).

Loth as I am to compliment any of them, your Jonathan Liews, your Suzy Wracks, your Jonathan Wilsons are all really quite good at this. I shudder when I see my Fisher-Price column sitting next to a Barney Ronay or a Marina Hyde. It blows my mind how they can turn out this stuff several times a week – when I find myself staring at a twitching cursor on a blank Google Doc before I decide to write about 90s football shirt sponsors again. Beyond the big games, one day European sports correspondent Nick Ames is in Ukraine reporting on how football is keeping hope alive, the next Donald McRae is eliciting more from an interviewee than anyone has before. We’re also leading the way in covering the women's game, from our Women’s Football Weekly podcast to the Moving the Goalposts newsletter and star columnists such as Karen Carney.

Beyond sport we are part of an even bigger thing. An independent group of journalists trying to find out the truth while the world burns. There’s no rogue state using us for soft power, no hedge fund just looking at the bottom line. It all costs money though. But why would you pay when you can read it all for free on your phone while you’re sitting on the toilet.

Well – with the important caveat that there’s a cost of living crisis and that there are worthier causes than ours, such as people enduring horrendous conflicts – if you are fortunate enough to be in a position to support the Guardian and Observer - then you are doing something important, as well as keeping me and Baz off the streets.

After this Premier League title race finishes (not to mention similarly exciting run-ins in the WSL, SPL, Championship and beyond) our football team will turn its attentions to the men’s European Championships in Germany, where the Guardian and Observer will will cover it all: from the first time Scotland get out of a group to England's drab 1-0 opening group win over Serbia followed by the inevitable, agonising, exit on penalties to an understrength Spain. Unless, well, for once in my lifetime, you never know … arise Sir Gareth! I, for one, can’t wait.

If you enjoy the Guardian’s 24/7 sports coverage, from liveblogs and analysis, to interviews, podcasts, quizzes, newsletters and David Squires cartoons please consider supporting us today. It takes roughly the amount of time it took Asmir Begovic to score against Southampton in 2013.

Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, apologies for asking, but your support of the Guardian and Observer will help me give my son something I never had: hope, or more accurately a Scalextric.

Max Rushden
Football Weekly presenter and Guardian sport columnist