The Interview: Chris Wittyngham (!)

After 201 Podcast Episodes, A Long-Overdue Interview with the Guy Who's Been with Me from the Start

Mar 3, 2022

Chris Wittyngham has been with me since the start of my podcast in May 2020, so I figured it was about time to interview the guy. He has been on a relentlessly upward trajectory in the media business as a soccer broadcaster, a regular on the Dan LeBatard Show and on the podcast we do together.

The entirety of the written interview below is reserved for paid subscribers. As always, you can still get the entire free audio version of my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to go for your pods.

Grant Wahl:

So let's use that as a nice transition into our interview of Chris Wittyngham. I've been wanting to learn some more things about you. I've gotten to know you pretty well over the last couple years, which is great. You're doing great work in the soccer world, including on this podcast and all the broadcasting you're doing. But I don't know the answer to this question: When did you fall in love with the sport of soccer?

Chris Wittyngham:

So I would probably say in earnest during the World Cup of 2010. So I did very much measure my life cycle in World Cups. '02, I was fairly aware of, but not entirely, because it was happening in the middle of the night. '06, I knew a lot about the American team. I knew the hype and all that, but I didn't really know the players that well, I knew them from the previous World Cup. And then 2010, I had completely gone all the way in.

That '09 Confederations Cup was a really big deal. And I think after that '09 Confederations Cup, you start to have these touchpoint moments which was like, okay, so Jozy Altidore plays over there, and Clint Dempsey plays over there, and I have to give my brother a lot of credit here, because he was at FIU down here in Miami at the time, and he had friends who were huge Premier League fans. I actually used to make fun of him, "how could you possibly care about a sport that's happening on the other side of the world?" This is a very myopic view of teenage Chris Wittyngham.

And so I then kind of secretly was like, "oh, okay, I'll watch a game. Oh, okay, this is cool." And then watched the World Cup. And then when Fox had the rights to the Premier League, they used to run this show called the Premier League Review Show, which was like an hour of all the games. And there would be a voiceover person introducing it and set you up with all the characters, and they tell you about Big Sam and Steve Bruce and Jose Mourinho, and you got to know everybody. And so I watched that for a full season as an agnostic, and then that was the year of the [Sergio] Agüero goal to win the league for Manchester City. And so I was like, "okay, this is awesome". And that was when I was fully in on the club game, and then I've kind of grown on that ever since.

Grant Wahl:

Okay, that's interesting. But like obviously on Le Batard show, which you're also on in case... If there's anybody who listens to this and doesn't know that Chris has a separate life on the Dan Le Batard show, you should check that out. You do talk about soccer to some extent on that show, but obviously you do a lot of other sports as well. So when you were growing up, in South Florida, right? Like you're born and bred.

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Chris Wittyngham:

Yeah, I was into the Miami Dolphins, that was kind of like my first sports love. I was like seven years old, and I remember watching Dan Marino basically walk toward retirement, throwing one interception after the other, a 62-7 defeat to the Jacksonville Jaguars. But for some reason, I still really threw myself into the Dolphins. But yeah, I love every local South Florida sports team. It started with the Dolphins, then I became a really big Heat fan, then the Florida Marlins at the time, now the Miami Marlins, won the World Series early in my sports life, which should have sent me on my way as a baseball fan. But they very much did not build on that success. And then hockey and then actually University of Miami, the school that I ended up going to, would come later when I went to the school, I wasn't really that into it, despite the fact they were an amazing football program and I kind of regret not throwing myself into it more, but yeah all the local South Florida teams, every sport, and then basically as you get into work life, as much as my life is following sports, you kind of have to start lopping some of them off.

So soccer has taken a lot of the oxygen. Maybe I would be more into baseball if I wasn't into soccer so much, I might be into hockey if I wasn't into soccer so much. But yeah, I mean football, American football, association football and basketball are kind of like the sports that I most kind of zero in on.

Grant Wahl:

Okay. And at what point did you decide you wanted to make a career out of sports?

Chris Wittyngham:

Very early, very early. Yeah, I was kind of very keenly aware. I mean, I was a massive sports fan as a kid, my dad's a massive sports fan, our family are massive sports fans. And so, I mean, I'm a terrible athlete. And so I, for whatever reason, seized upon the voice emanating from the television whenever I'd watch sports, like, "huh, that seems like an interesting way to get in this thing that I'm really interested in". And so I kind of knew from when I was in middle school that I wanted to go and be a broadcaster. So I really threw myself into it. I studied play by play people, I studied the radio, like this was in high school, I used to listen to AM radio in high school.

And I became so singularly focused on trying to do this for a living. And I guess it's one of the rare times where somebody actually does that and then actually ends up doing the thing that they set out to do. I have since hopefully achieved a little bit more life balance, but yeah, this was an obsession of mine that I've wanted to do this for basically as long as I can remember.

Grant Wahl:

And how did you get tied to the Le Batard show?

Chris Wittyngham:

So that was actually my foray into it, believe it or not, considering it such a big show. But I at the time was a huge fan of his show. I was, again, a teenager listening to AM radio. I remember one of their clips went viral on ESPN, they used to have Terrell Owens on all the time. And it was the lead on the six o'clock Sports Center one night. And I was like, "wait, that's in Miami. What do you mean? Like, how do I not know about this?" And so I started listening to the show, and for people who don't listen to the Dan Le Batard show, they don't understand that it's not just a show that people like, it's kind of like a way with which you view sports content.

Once you listen to that show, you can't really go back to listening to sports in another way, because it's so much more fun based, laughter based. And you just throw yourself into this universe of characters that's so fun to listen to. And so they, I mean, they've always, and we still do solicit listener submissions. I used to send super-long emails into the show and they actually kind of got to know me a little bit. And so after one of the long emails, I kind of said, "and also if you ever need an intern for anything, let me know". And they actually took me up on it, so I was a teenager who got to stroll in and kind of meet all of my heroes in a weird way. And I'm friends with all of them, some of them are still with the show, some of them aren't with the show anymore, but that was actually where I began, and I began on a path of doing sports radio more than broadcasting, which came later.

Grant Wahl:

And so this is actually the phrase, "never meet your heroes". Not totally true.

Chris Wittyngham:

All of my heroes are more than I could've hoped for. Yes, absolutely. [Laughs]

Grant Wahl:

And I've also never asked you this, so much of sports culture in the city of Miami and South Florida is Spanish language. Do you speak Spanish?

Chris Wittyngham:

Poorly. Yeah, so basically I need to be thrown into the deep end of the pool. My entire family is Colombian. So basically, when my mom's cousins are in town and I'm in the car and I need to carry a conversation for 40 minutes, all of the sudden my Spanish gets great. But I think, because I'm a bit of an obsessive about language given the fact that we work in language, I feel naked in a way when I speak Spanish. Because I don't feel like I have every word available to me, and so I feel like I get gun-shy about speaking Spanish, but yeah, if you really press me into it, I can basically, if I need to, I will, but sometimes I'm hesitant about it, which is something that I need to work on.

Grant Wahl:

Gotcha, and how did you get this whole British thing about you and the whole “fancy lad” nickname?

Chris Wittyngham:

So it started actually in the Le Batard show environment. Again, I started watching all these Premier League games. And I was a bit of a parrot where I would just listen to, "oh, what a lovely ball that is". And it would just stick in my head, and so I would just like, every once in a while I'd be like, "watch, oh, what a great crossing head into the back post". Like I would just start doing my stupid accent in front of other people. and so one time during the World Cup in 2014, I was working at the radio station. I was partly on Le Batard show, but I was partly on other shows, and I started doing this around one of the hosts.

And he is like, "what if you came on and did a bit where we do serious World Cup analysis with you in your British accent. And we never mentioned the fact that you're not actually a British person". And so we did that every day for a month, during the World Cup, because the radio station had sponsored World Cup segments. So I would come on every day in my British accent. And so ever since then, first off, a lot of my Le Batard show colleagues hate it. But then from there I still do the accent around people. I started doing it around the show, and then the fancy lad thing was kind of born out of a couple times on the show, I would like throw ridiculous language around or I would say, "oh, that's bollocks" or something like that.

Like just use Britishisms around the show, intentionally trying to annoy my colleagues and the audience. I knew that it was annoying, I know it's annoying, but I do it anyway because I find it funny. And thus the Fancy Lad character was born and Dan said, "oh we need to have some sound". Because Pablo Torre of ESPN used to have a little sound that would play whenever he would use some highfalutin language. And so a listener actually came up with a little sound that said, "Chris Wittyngham is a fancy lad" and I've been branded that ever since.

Grant Wahl:

My last question is what are all the different soccer broadcasting things you're doing this year?

Chris Wittyngham:

So this year I've actually paired it down quite a bit, because my Le Batard show responsibilities basically got to a point where I can't do the CONMEBOL Sudamericana anymore. I need to figure out what are my main assignments going to be. So I'm doing Inter Miami for both radio and TV. There'll be some radio, there'll be some TV, and Univision's coverage of MLS. Every once in a while I might pop up, like I did a CCL game the other day, the Vista Worldlink is really good to me. And so every once in a while they ask me to do some things, and I'll do some things for them. Some MLS Next, some NWSL maybe this year, but those are my main assignments. If you want, I can go through like every league that I've ever covered, which I've written down once before and it's fairly bonkers.

So I started with the NASL. I have done the Chilean domestic cup, the Chilean league, the French Ligue 1, Serie A I did once, I did CONMEBOL, both World Cup qualifiers and the Sudamericana, never Libertadores, I've done CONCACAF World Cup qualifying. I did a FIFA Interconfederation playoff between Australia, oh my God, and who were they playing? Oh, this is going to kill me. I've forgot, I did one of those Interconfederation playoffs once.

Grant Wahl:

Wow.

Chris Wittyngham:

MLS, NWSL, USL, USL Championship. I did a CONCACAF under 15 tournament once. Yeah. I think I got to all of them, but yeah, I've done quite a bit and never once have I done a game, I'm trying to think, have I done a game outside of Miami? I have not. All of this has been in Miami.

Grant Wahl:

Oh wow.

Chris Wittyngham:

Yeah. Every single one of these places that I've done a game from it's mostly in a closet in Miami somewhere.

Grant Wahl:

Well, thanks for giving us a window into the Chris Wittyngham story!

Chris Wittyngham:

Thanks for asking.