Who is the best player in Spanish football?
It is clear that there are many players, from Lamine Yamal, who enjoyed the rise of the climate in Barcelona at the age of 18, to Pedri, who has woven magic in everything he has with the Blaugranas, to Kylian Mbappe, who is on the verge of receiving the second Pichichi award with Real Madrid, to other players such as Viniciusing Junior, Julian and Raphinha. However, it is beyond doubt that the best English language journalist in Spanish football is none other than Simon James ‘Sid’ Lowe.
Born in Archway, England on June 21, 1976, Lowe grew up in North London and quickly associated himself with football – choosing to support Liverpool over local sides Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur – and the Spanish language and culture. At 13, Lowe studied abroad in Lorca, Spain and loved it so much that he decided to study Spanish and graduated with A-Levels in the subject. Lowe first studied History and Politics at the University of Sheffield before moving on to a double honors degree in History and Spanish and spent the 1996/97 academic year in Oviedo. Lowe balanced his time between researching a part-time Masters in History, earning a PhD in 20th-century Spanish history at the University of Sheffield, and completing his thesis. Catholicism, War and the Foundation of Francoism: The Popular Juventud de Accion in Spain, 1932-1937 published in the book.
“I think I’m one of those people who was very lucky,” Lowe said in an exclusive interview with Football España. “I ended up in this position not because I didn’t make decisions but rather because I made decisions. I first went to Spain when I was 13, on an exchange trip to Lorca, a small town in Murcia. I studied Spanish at school, and that trip to Lorca had a big impact on me in terms of feeling ‘Wow, I really like Spain, I really like Spanish people and I really like my life. My idea of what Spain was, and what the point of learning was I went on to study Spanish and took my A-Levels between 16-18, and I decided early on that I would probably do Spanish at university and I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll do Spanish while I’m there, because you always get a third part of your degree, and that’s what I did at the time.’
“That meant a year abroad in Oviedo in 1996-97, which reflects my age. That’s where the two things really come together, because football gives me the opportunity to go to the city. It gives me a place to reach people, it provides something that creates a bond of people that makes me focus not only on playing football, but playing football with the home team. Three times before I broke my ankle. So that didn’t end well, but it was an amazing experience. time, I was very interested in Spanish history, so I came back, and I decided I wanted to do postgraduate research, and I did a part-time masters course which I paid for by teaching Southern European fascism at Barnsley College.
Same with others like Stephen Constantine and Kevin EganLowe was forced to put his playing ambitions on hold after a long injury, but this did not stop him from remaining interested in football. Shortly after moving to Madrid to further his postgraduate research, Lowe was hired by the Guardian as the website’s chief Spanish football expert in 2000. Lowe has charted La Liga’s rise to the top as the Spanish league overtakes Serie A and the Premier League in international stature, with the arrival of stars such as David Beckham and the likes of Ronaldinho. Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are seeing more balls than ever before in La Liga. He has been able to parlay his Spanish football expertise into opportunities with World Soccer, FourFourTwo, and TalkSport, as well as interpreting gigs for foreign La Liga players such as Beckham, Michael Owen, and Thomas Gravesen, and although he has made his bread and butter in the English language, he has never shied away from covering the game in Spanish.
“I don’t write much in Spanish, although from time to time, I am asked to write things. It seems that I am often asked to write forewords for people’s books, and sometimes I write guest columns for magazines. But where I have done things in Spanish are radio stations like Onda Cero and Cadena SER. I think the beginning with Onda Cero Riccipo who corresponded with Filipo from Madrid was there with Filiphu from Madrid. dello Sport, because the idea was, ‘Actually, it’s great to have an international perspective. Let’s open up these two guys and have a different perspective on how we do things.’ We used to do a slot on Thursday night, in Onda Cero, then we go to Cadena SER.”
“It was always the idea of having a different opinion, 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 perfect, people would want you, because they like this idea a lot. The accent that makes you sound a little different, gives you something different. But I commented on La Sextato-Free TV, 2-3 years of TV show every Saturday night, free TV, years 2-3 and the beginning of that was at the 2006 FIFA World Cup.”
“La Sexta was a brand new channel in Spain, and they decided that the way to really make an impact was to get the rights to the World Cup. And the World Cup was their way of saying, ‘Here’s this new channel, and you all have to listen to it on your TV, because they’re going to have the World Cup,’ and they did a lot of programming on the World Cup games and they got someone to play in every World Cup they’d played. They had to have a Frenchman, they had an Italian, they had an Argentinean, Brazilians, everything.”
“That was the beginning of me doing many hours in front of a Spanish camera, and it was partly based on the idea of, ‘This person is from another country, but that gives another perspective.’ And that led to many other things, many studio shows and being invited 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 terrible show, to be completely honest, but it was what it was, and it was. I said I enjoyed doing it, and I think they must have thought so. I communicated well, and I have been asked… There have been loads and loads of things in Spanish over the years too. Actually, I don’t do any radio now because there was a lot going on, and I didn’t have time for everything.”
Lowe wrote this book about Spanish football – figuratively and literally. Since covering Spain’s victory at Euro 2012, Lowe has had the opportunity to cover all of Spain’s competitions from the Euros upwards. World Cups at the United Nations, covering the game by writing articles for ESPN and The Guardian and doing TV and radio research for ESPN and other outlets. And ten years after he published “Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona, Real Madrid, and the World’s Greatest Sports Rivalry,” his book remains one of the most popular soccer books and a must-read for both addicts and beginners to the Spanish game, or young soccer players like Jason Shokalook.
“The fear and disappointment came because this was the height of the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry. Obviously, it’s Messi and Ronaldo, the biggest thing, and the publisher liked the idea of a Madrid-Barcelona book. Basically I said no at first: ‘Look, you’re taking the history of the two biggest clubs in the world, it’s too big’. And they just kept waving at me and said, ‘But you know a lot about it, you won’t need to do a lot of research, you can write something for a British audience that doesn’t need to know much. It would be an introduction, you don’t have to dig deep. And I don’t know if it’s because of my training and my background as a historian, but I was very conscious from the beginning. I said, ‘Look, if I do this, we’re going to do this in a way that, even if this was a Spanish book, it’s going to have new things, or have a new approach to this.
“Finally, I took it, and it was really big. In the office I’m sitting in now, I actually have two different desks, and I would switch desks, so my day job would be on one desk, my book work would be on another desk, so I could stop and say ‘Okay, that’s what you leave there, and I can take it from there. It was like a detective or a crime scene thing. I had a big board on the wall with arrows pointing to things, and scraps of things that I had, and piles of papers everywhere.”
“There is a picture somewhere of piles of papers when I finished, and everywhere, and it was completely crazy. And when I finished, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to write a book anymore. And actually, I haven’t written my book since then. I was involved, in a translation like Roberto Firmino’s book, but that was my book, and I ended up thinking about that book of mine. It came out of me I really like to go back to that.”
