THE well-known Scottish football writer and broadcaster, Graham Spiers, is stepping down from The Times.
Five years after having been appointed Scottish football correspondent at The Times, Spiers is taking a redundancy deal from the newspaper.
He plans to write books and continue his broadcasting career. Between his leaving The Herald, where he was chief sportswriter, and joining The Times, he took time out to write a book about the former Rangers FC manager, Paul Le Guen.
His broadcasting commitments include a weekly appearance on Radio Clyde, in a football phone-in.
Prior to joining The Herald in 2000, he was at Scotland on Sunday. He leaves The Times in just over a month’s time.
Spiers told allmediascotland.com: “As much as I’ve enjoyed The Times – and it is a fantastic newspaper – I’ve hankered for around 18 months now to be able to write about other things, as well as football. I’d enquired about voluntary redundancy a couple of times, and a lot of papers these days, in their routine rounds of cuts, offer pretty fair terms.
“I hope to continue covering football, because that is my gig. But I just fancy doing other stuff as well -maybe different types of broadcasting, books, interviews, etc. It’s just the stage I’ve reached. Ask any sports hack who has come away from his hundredth pre-match Friday press conference and, hand on heart, he’ll confess to a degree of world-weariness about it all.
“But I’m quite up front about this. I’m smiling now, and happy to be branching out, but ask me again in a year – I might be starving and on my uppers. I don’t know what’s out there, it’ll be an adventure.”
