You’d be hard-pressed to find a Spanish football journalist with as fulfilling and diverse of a career experience as Simon James ‘Sid’ Lowe.
Born in Archway, England on June 21, 1976, Lowe grew up in North London but supported Liverpool instead of Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur. Indeed, his main two passions early on were football and Spanish, with Lowe studying abroad in Lorca, Spain at the age of 13 before deciding to study Spanish and graduate with his A-Levels in this subject. Lowe began studying History and Politics at the University of Sheffield before shifting to a dual honors degree in History and Spanish and spending the 1996/97 academic year in Oviedo. Lowe paid for a part-time Master’s degree in History by teaching a course on Southern European fascism at Barnsley College and earned a PhD in 20th-century Spanish history from the University of Sheffield, with his doctoral thesis “Catholicism, War and the Foundation of Francoism: The Juventud de Acción Popular in Spain, 1932-1937” being published into a book. In order to be closer to the original source archive, Lowe made the move to Madrid in 2001. Fast-forward a quarter-century, and he’s still there today.
“England and the UK as a whole have changed enormously since I left at 24/25 years of age. We’re still not a team that wins anything, but I think the way the rest of the world looks at the England national team is now different,” stated Lowe in an exclusive Get Spanish Football News interview. “People look at England now and think, ‘Actually, that is a team that should be amongst the three or four favourites at every tournament. And of course, England have been to the last two European Championship Finals, and they were knocked out by France in the last World Cup quarterfinal, and had gotten to the semifinal vs. Croatia in the previous tournament. So there is an idea that this is a really good team now.”
“I think back then, there was probably an idea that there were some major flaws, and one of the things that always struck me was that I felt like we tended to look at other countries and talk about how we needed to change everything, the entire structure. This was reflected was 1998, where everyone was saying, ‘We need to be like France and have a system like Clairefontaine,’ and then you have the Spanish team that wins the World Cup in 2010, and you have this idea that maybe we need to learn from the Spanish system. I think lots of things have changed to shift the perspective of English football. Immigration patterns have changed the nature of the English national tea; I think inner-city football has changed the kids’ level and all the way through people’s youth, I think it has changed the way that people play football in England. Obviously, the shift in the Premier League, the arrival of foreign players has changed the mentality of what we do in England, and so there’s a whole series of elements that have shifted England, but I do think that we are still probably in that mindset.”
Similarly to others like Kevin Egan and Stephen Constantine, Lowe was forced to halt his playing ambitions after suffering a serious injury during his first years as a young adult. However, he didn’t allow this to stop him from carving out a career in the beautiful game. Shortly after moving to Madrid, Lowe became The Guardian’s chief LaLiga correspondent, a role that he has occupied to this day, whilst the arrival of David Beckham to Real Madrid in 2003 would see Lowe juggle a number of different writing gigs for just about every single top English sports outlet and learn from some of the most seasoned sports journalist in the entire industry.
“I was already with The Guardian, but I started doing stuff for the Telegraph as well, and what happened from these British journalists turning up in Madrid is that I started to learn how to do journalism, how to do the day-to-day stuff. Beckham’s arrival created a volume of interest, which changed the game completely, and it created for me an apprenticeship by being with these British journalists who were covering Beckham. I had been writing some other stuff, what I would like to think were nice pieces about things and so on, but what I learned then was newsgathering, the day-to-day nuts and bolts of it. And, you know, people like Eric Beauchamp and Simon Cass, in particular, who ended up being really good friends of mine, I learned so much from them because they turned up. They knew how this worked, and I didn’t, and I kind of followed them.”
“I didn’t really make decisions, but I was already writing about football, and then Beckham turns up, so there’s an interest, and I’m following that. I wasn’t really necessarily planning to do this; I just kind of naturally slipped into it. Now, obviously, with hindsight now, I might look at this and think, ‘Oof, I shouldn’t have pigeonholed myself, because I’m now the guy that really is useful to my newspaper and to everyone else, because I know about Spain, not about anything else. But to be perfectly honest, it’s turned out quite nicely for me, and I do love it. You go back and you find pieces, and it’s 20 years of me writing about this stuff that engages you and drags you in and makes you feel part of it. Obviously, the way that I’ve written has changed over the years, the amount of access that I’ve had has changed over the years, and the sense of my own involvement in it has changed over all those years as well. But I think the reason I never worried about being pigeonholed was that I was always on a journey to somewhere. I didn’t really know where, I was just kind of following something, and to be honest, I sort of still am. I don’t really have an endgame here, I just kind of do what I do.”
Lowe has enjoyed a successful writing career as a journalist for esteemed outlets like The Guardian and ESPN in addition to working TV punditry for the latter, whilst he’s also done punditry at the radio level and even branched out to Spanish-language work on an occasional basis, and he is the author of “Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona, Real Madrid, and the World’s Greatest Sports Rivalry,” considered to be the seminal book on the history of El Clásico. Whilst Lowe hasn’t written a book ever since, he has collaborated with legendary footballers like Andrés Iniesta, Fernando Torres, Roberto Firmino and Luis Suárez to tell their stories in the English language. He’s covered every single Spain tournament since their triumph in the 2012 Euros, and next summer, he’ll be looking to check off one of the few remaining things in his journalistic career’s bucket list: covering the journey every step of the way and watching Spain win the World Cup in North America. He has, however, followed Spain’s conquests in 2012 and 2024, watching La Roja defeat his England and deny them a first-ever Euro title.
“It’s funny, that, because I think in the build-up to the game, I probably thought, ‘Oh, it would just be so good to be there when England finally won something. I’d seen Spain win something. And, obviously, the reality is I am English, despite living in Spain, and despite having an enormous amount of affection and fondness for Spain, and despite wanting Spain to win all the time. But when you’re working, it really is true that you lose some of the fandom because you’re there trying to write something, so you gain a fondness for the thing you are writing about. Now, I wasn’t writing the match report that night; we had 4-5 people in the stadium, but we had 3 people writing live pieces. We had a match report, we had an England piece, and we had a Spain piece, and I was doing a Spain piece. Whatever happened, I was going to be writing about Spain, not England, I wasn’t going to be writing this piece of, ‘Wow, England’s wait is finally over. That wasn’t going to be me. Whatever happened, it was going to be about Spain.”
“I suppose what happens is you get drawn into Spain because that’s what you’re focusing on, and in terms of my professional career, in terms of the human element of it, I cover Spain, I know all the people at the Spanish Federation, I know the Spanish players, I know the other Spanish journalists, I know lots of Spanish fans, and so when you’re in that environment, there is a warmth for Spain. So when Spain won, there was no part of me that thought, ‘Shit. Admittedly, when England equalized, I did think, ‘Wow, am I going to be here when England finally wins something? But then when Spain won, there was an enjoyment element to seeing Spain win, and being able to be in a position to explain it and write about it and leave a lasting record of how Spain did it, that’s really enjoyable. There’s a kind of professional satisfaction in doing those finals, and I still really do like the fact that there is a piece written by me, that’s still there, and will always be there, about Messi winning a World Cup in Qatar. Everyone was waiting for this, and here’s your record of it, and it was me who gave it to you. I can get it right or wrong, but it was me that gave it to you, and then the same with 2012, and the same with 2024, which is part of the reason why the big regret for me is not having been there in 2010 and seeing Spain win a World Cup in South Africa.”
