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Joey D’Urso
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Joey D’Urso is a journalist writing about the intersections of football, politics & power. From 2020 to 2024 he reported on football as investigations writer for The Athletic, and from 2024 to 2026 he was a senior data journalist at The Times. He has reported on the Football Index scandal, how the Premier League facilitated illegal gambling in Asia and how clubs promoted cryptocurrency products that harmed fans. His investigations have been cited many times in Parliament and he has been shortlisted in the Sports Journalism category at the British Journalism Awards twice, as well as shortlisted for writer of the year by the Football Writers’ Association.
Before making the move to covering football in 2020, he was a reporter at BuzzFeed News and prior to that he worked at BBC Politics in Westminster. In 2022 he completed an MSc at the Oxford Internet Institute, specialising in advanced statistics and writing a thesis on online scams.
Books
Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Change the World
Tim Gregory
One of The Times Best Books of 2025, The Guardian’s Best Sports Books of 2025 and Waterstones Sports Books of the Year 2025.
Twenty-two football shirts that explain the world, geopolitics and the biggest stories of our time.
Football is the world’s most popular sport, and the shirts worn by teams and their supporters are its greatest means of cultural expression. Every year clubs launch new kits with increasingly extravagant marketing campaigns and convoluted explanations of how their designs reflect their history and local community. But football shirts are much more than just a symbol of which club we support. A seemingly innocuous combination of colours, sponsor logos and materials can all reflect the social values, financial struggles and political ideologies of the day, as geopolitical issues increasingly seep into every aspect of the game.
Investigative journalist Joey D’Urso has travelled across the globe, combining on-the-ground reporting with unparalleled analysis to collate a list of the twenty-two football shirts that best explain the modern world. More Than A Shirt will take fans on a journey from Birmingham to Belgrade and onto Medellin and Mumbai, outlining how we can see the war in Ukraine in the shirt of Schalke in Germany or China’s foreign policy in West Bromwich Albion’s; how the shirts of state-owned clubs are used for sportswashing; and why the French national kit embodies worldwide migration patterns.
A compelling and eye-opening exploration, More Than A Shirt is essential reading for any football fan and will change the way you think about the beautiful game’s most universal symbol.
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