Anything but Footy

Anything but Footy takes its title seriously: everything outside football, with Olympic and Paralympic sport at the centre. Michael and John host together, trading the opening lines and finishing each other's setups. The rhythm is brisk and conversational. Questions run long and arrive with a frame already built in. Recent episodes are shaped by a crowded calendar. Glasgow 2026 gets a countdown at four months out and again inside 100 days. The first European Athletics Championships staged in the UK is treated as the other half of that summer, and one host recalls winning a first major title at the Europeans in 1998 — a reminder of how short a career can be. LA 2028 hovers over everything. A ticket ballot with no time slot produces genuine disappointment, and there is a running thread about how a guest kept steering conversation back to LA, where the next judgement will land after five out of five in Paris. Qualification and selection cycles are already beginning. Between the games, the show handles news properly. Elite withdrawals from the London Marathon, an Achilles injury derailing a Dutch star's preparation, plans for a two-day London Marathon and the pushback those plans have drawn. There is coverage of the Boat Race, the World Snooker Championship, the Grand National and the Masters, framed as a British sporting spring. A world indoor championships episode brings an athlete through the tactical detail of a race — going hard at 200 metres, seeing what is left in the tank — and the light-hearted celebration that followed, plus the road back from ending a season on crutches. The Great British Bosses strand widens the lens to the people running the sport. Siobhan Cassidy, chair of the Boat Race Company, discusses why an amateur event first raced in 1829 still matters, and what it asks of student athletes balancing academic work with elite training. Another instalment weighs why athletics is the one Olympic sport with commercial reach comparable to major leagues, and how hard it is to find backers for something that has never been tried. Para-sport is threaded through rather than bolted on, with Glasgow 2026 billed as the biggest Commonwealth Games for para-sport in its history. The hosts are unashamedly partial to British success and cheerfully say so. What keeps it from being a fan show is the follow-through: a result gets celebrated, then interrogated for context, pressure and consequence. It suits anyone who follows these sports between the games, not only during them.