Graham Spiers is a Scottishsports journalist who writes for the Scottish edition ofThe Times newspaper. He has won Scotland's Sports Journalist of the Year award four times.[1]
Spiers grew up in Edinburgh, Fife and Glasgow,[2] and attended theUniversity of St Andrews.[3] He worked as chief sportswriter atThe Herald from 2001 to 2007. He then moved to The Times where has worked off and on since 2007. He was a regular pundit on theScottish televisionfootball highlights showScotsport, shown onSTV, before the show ended in May 2008. He also appeared frequently onClyde 1's football showSuper ScoreBoard, andSetanta Sports'Press Box. From around 2011 onwards Spiers has appeared in various formats onBBC Radio Scotland.
He was brought up as aRangers fan,[4] but has been a prominent critic of Rangers' leadership and supporters, highlighting many incidents of racism andsectarianism.[3][5][6][7]
In 2007,Random House published his book,L'Enigma – A Chronicle of Trauma and Turmoil at Rangers (ISBN 1-84596-291-5) onPaul Le Guen's short tenure as the manager ofRangers.[3] In the same year he also contributed a chapter to the bookIt's Rangers for me?[4]
In September 2008, Spiers wrote "For years nowCeltic Park – unlikeIbrox – has been largely free of sectarian or racist chanting."[9] In the aftermath of the2008 UEFA Cup final riots, Spiers called Rangers "a club with poison at its core."[10] In June 2013 Spiers expressed his own view that the Rangers which reformed in the lower divisions after the original company's2012 liquidation was a new club rather than a direct continuation of the liquidated entity.[11]
In January 2016, Spiers, by now a freelance writer, was involved in a dispute with Rangers regarding alleged comments made to him by a Rangers director. The club were demanding an apology fromThe Herald, for whom Spiers wrote a column, while the writer himself maintained that what he had written was accurate. AlthoughThe Herald published an apology for the column, Spiers in turn issued his own statement, defending himself and saying he would not be contributing any more columns to the paper.[12] He joinedThe Times a month later, though that move had already been agreed before theHerald row.
Columnist Angela Haggerty ofThe Herald's sister paper,The Sunday Herald, was also sacked after she supported Spiers onTwitter.[13][14][15][16][17]
In recent years, Spiers has conducted theatre interviews at theEdinburgh Fringe, involving figures from the world of politics, theatre, the arts and sport.[18]
And, amid it all, the team I loved was Rangers.
Scottish journalist Spiers [...] fiercely suggests that all negative headlines connected to poor fan behaviour are the result of a sizeable minority fans regularly acting in anti-social ways.
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