Updated 5 March, 14.30
“DO YOU WANT to see a picture of Producer Ben?” Simon Conway asks.
To a lot of people the question would mean nothing but to a certain group of football fans, it’s almost like a Wizard of Oz moment, an invitation to peek behind the curtain.
Producer Ben — or Ben Green to give him his proper title — is the man behind the magic of the Guardian’s much-loved Football Weekly podcast. Its mix of quick wit and sharp insight has seen it become a twice-weekly staple for many fans in search of something a little bit more meaty than bland soundbites and tired analysis.
The pod’s regulars — presenter James Richardson (he of Football Italia fame) and contributors Jonathan Wilson, Barry Glendenning and Sid Lowe among others — are established journalists with the profile that follows.
But Producer Ben? He’s a man of mystery.
“That’s him,” Conway says as he spins his phone around to reveal a picture of an unidentifiable man’s back. “If you want to see him, you’ll have to come to the event.”
He’s talking about an evening in Griffith College Conference Centre later this month, a Q&A session with the Football Weekly team followed by a live screening of Manchester United’s Champions League tie against Olympiakos.
Much like Producer Ben’s identity it’s not of interest to everyone, but the man behind Con Artist promotions has found that there’s a definite appetite among Irish football fans for this type of nuanced, conversation-driven event.
It’s lads, arguing about football in a pub, but with a slightly more sophisticated twist.
The Football Weekly night will be the fifth gig of this kind. It started back in November with a panel of contributors to The Blizzard, a quarterly publication started by the Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson to allow writers to explore more oblique football stories than the confines of traditional media allow.
Wilson returned for another event to promote his latest book, a history of Liverpool in 10 matches, while another Guardian regular Sid Lowe came to town to discuss his work on the historic roots of the legendary Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry.
Tonight the editors of three Manchester United fanzines will pick through the wreckage of the club’s decline this season in front of a live audience in the Sugar Club.
Conway, a Dubliner with a mad passion for football, knows how to run a show. Con Artist is effectively a one-man operation though he ropes in friends and family to help out with chauffeuring and microphone-shuttling on the nights themselves.
He’s been doing this since the early 2000s but it was music, rather than football, that took up most of his time back then. He ran a club night, Electric City, with friend and fellow DJ Giles Armstrong; more recently he put on Forza Italo, another club night which celebrates classic Italian culture: Italo tunes from the late 70s and early 80s, Giallo and Italian horror films and of course, vintage football matches.
“The events, they’ve always been a passion,” he explains. “I’ve never done them to make money but at the same time I haven’t had money to lose on them either.
“That’s sort of the tagline for Con Artist: ‘Events, my dear boy, events.’ It was the thing that Harold Macmillan most feared that it would topple his government.
Perversely, it’s about going after the thing that you fear because you don’t know when you put something up there if there’s going to be interest in it.Sometimes you think you might be better off going in to Paddy Power and throwing your money on a dog or on a horse. I suppose this is a more long-winded way of doing that and it’s more enjoyable for me.
The Blizzard idea came to him in a flash of inspiration mixed in with a dash of courage.
“I didn’t do any market research and I didn’t ask the guys how many subscribers they had in Ireland. I thought, I like the book, a couple of my mates like the book as well, so just do it.
“It might have been the last football gig I ever did if nobody else had shown up.”
But the feedback that he got from both sides of the microphone, the journalists and the audience, as well as the bums on seats were enough proof that there is a market for these type of events.
Football talks are nothing new. Ex-pros have long been paying bills by doing the rounds on the after-dinner and promotional circuit but these events, and the type of people they attract, aren’t quite in that mould.
For one thing the level of attention to detail here is impressive, whether that’s in organising pre-talk entertainment (a slideshow of obscure number 10s for the audience to guess at) or a post-show match screening (Liverpool’s famous 5-0 win over Nottingham Forest in 1988, most recently).
Even the posters, crafted for Conway by designer Manus Sweeney, hint at something a little bit different.
“Con Artist is not a major promotional player. I’m never going to be taking ads in the Herald or in Ireland international programmes, I don’t have the wherewithal or the finance to do that.
These are not those type of events. This isn’t Didi Hamann in the Olympia for seventy quid or whatever it might be. It’s a bit more bespoke and needs a bit more of the personal touch.
“I think the posters really give a sense of what it’s about, that it’s going to go a little bit deeper than the commentary and be a little bit more insightful than some talks.”
Does Con Artist’s success so far suggest that this insightful, and dare we say nerdy, type of football fan is becoming more common in Ireland?
It’s always been there, Conway explains, pointing to magazines like When Saturday Comes.
But now it’s starting to dip its toe more and more into the mainstream.
It is a growing subculture. People are a bit more interested in discussing tactics with people, the font on the back of the Barcelona shirt, you see this stuff cropping up in conversation.
“Maybe it’s young lads, a bit nerdy, who would have taken that same approach in the 70s and 80s with music.
“But now it’s a recognition of that culture that goes with football: the fashion and the history, the interconnections, a global understanding of what was happening in South America, in the Dutch school, even what Roy Hodgson and Bob Houghton did in Sweden.
“Maybe people just want to be more knowledgeable than the next bore down the pub, I don’t know, but for me and a lot of football fans it is fascinating.”
