18 Oct 2026
The race to be football podcasting's most-heard voice
Who do football podcast listeners actually hear the most? Counting appearances across 59,263 episodes gives a running answer for every month since 2006. Presenters appear on every episode of their own shows, which would bury everyone else, so the chart starts with guest and interviewee spots only. Switch on “Include hosting” to count everything.
The Football Weekly panel
For most of the first decade the guest list is the Guardian's. By Oct 2010 the leaders on 12-month form were Sid Lowe, Sean Ingle and Raphael Honigstein, all regulars around the Football Weekly table. That is partly because there was less competition and partly because Football Weekly's archive survives in full, while many other early shows have lost their back catalogues. Career guest totals, the view the chart opens on, still reflect it: Sid Lowe, Jonathan Wilson and Nicky Bandini lead the way.
Jonathan Wilson's long climb
Jonathan Wilson (highlighted in amber) is a voice that built up over years rather than arriving all at once. On career guest appearances he was 10th in Oct 2010, 5th by Oct 2015 and has been 2nd since Oct 2021, behind only Sid Lowe. That's 560 guest appearances, most of them on Football Weekly, Second Captains and OTB Football, and 14 different shows in all. Press play to watch him work his way up from the edge of the chart.
Today's most-booked guests
Switch to 12-month form and the leaders now are Miguel Delaney, David Ornstein, Jessy Parker Humphreys and Lars Sivertsen, the voices heard most often in the past year when they aren't presenting. The bars show how many different shows those appearances came from.
With hosting switched on
Count presenters too and shows that publish several times a week take over, because their regulars rack up a couple of hundred episodes a year. On career totals James Richardson leads with 2,034 appearances, and the leaders on 12-month form become Gordon Dalziel, Marcus Speller, Gordon Duncan and Roger Bennett. Rory Smith is the big riser there: 5th on 12-month form, up from 18th a year earlier, thanks to new regular roles.
How this is counted
- One appearance = one episode a person took part in, on any of the 124 shows in the family tree.
- Participants come from episode titles and show notes (see how it works). Regular hosts are often not named in notes, so their totals can be undercounts.
- Club-specific podcasts aren't included, so club-show regulars score lower here than their audiences might suggest.
- Early years are dominated by the shows whose archives survive; gaps in other feeds will understate their hosts.