Moderator Gabriele Marcotti will be joined by fellow football journalists Raphael Honigstein and Guillem Balague, as they look at how the media narrates football across the world.

Moderator | Gabriele Marcotti is a Senior Writer for ESPN and UK Correspondent for the Italian daily Corriere dello Sport. Previously, he spent 16 years as World Football Columnist for The Times of London and he has also been a regular columnist for Sports Illustrated and the Wall Street Journal. Thanks to his model good looks, he has been a fixture on various TV outlets for many years, from ITV to Sky Sports and from the BBC to BT Sport.

He has covered six World Cups, four European Championships as well as the last 17 Champions League finals, the only exception being 2003-04, because a.) it was held in Gelsenkirchen and b.) he got married instead.

He was born a long goal kick away from the San Siro in Milan, but spent his childhood around the globe, growing up in Chicago, Warsaw, Frankfurt, New York, Tokyo and London. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a contemporary of Elon Musk (though he does not drive a Tesla) and followed up with an MSc in Journalism from Columbia University.

He has written four books, beginning with Paolo Di Canio’s autobiography, though he’s perhaps proudest of The Italian Job, in which he and Sampdoria and Chelsea legend Gianluca Viali harassed coaches, players and executives in Italy and England into revealing just what makes football in those countries different… and the same.

Covering football has robbed him of his ability to be a die-hard fan of a club, so he channels his fandom via his irrational love of the Philadelphia Eagles. He lives in West London, steps away from Freddie Mercury’s house, with his wife, two daughters and two cats. And he spends too much time on Twitter, @marcotti.

Raphael Honigstein hails from Munich – which he describes as “the northernmost Italian city” – and has covered football in Germany and England for two decades. He currently works for, among others, The Athletic, Der Spiegel and BT Sport. Previously, he has appeared in Suddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian and ESPN.

He is the author of four books, most recently Bring the Noise: The Jurgen Klopp Story, which many in the analytics community have shown to be critical to helping Liverpool win their sixth European Cup. His previous book – “The Big Book of Treasures” – has nothing to do with football and is aimed at children aged X to X. That too is often credited as being crucial to Liverpool’s recent success. He’s also a foodie with a nose for exclusive restaurants and a music aficionado whose spiritual home resides in 1980s rap.

He graduated with an honours degree in Law from University College London which doesn’t get much use these days. And because that wasn’t enough, he also has an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics. He lives in North London with his wife and three daughters.

You can follow him on Twitter, @honigstein.

Guillem Balague has been a key fixture in Sky Sports’ coverage of Spanish football for 20 years, appearing weekly on Revista de La Liga, as well as regular pundit at the weekend. In the summer of 2018 he moved to BBC Sport where he is presenting a weekly Radio5Live show on European football, has a regular show where he interviews the top names in football (Pep Guardiola was the first one), and he writes a blog and creates content for the broadcaster (Champions League and Premier League coverage). He is also the UK Correspondent for AS, the Madrid-based Spanish sports newspaper and a regular contributor to El Partidazo (COPE), the biggest football radio show in Spain, plus he writes a regular column on Goal.com.

He is the best known face of the official coverage of LaLiga TV due to his two decades of coverage of the Spanish league and his 1m+ followers on Twitter. He has his own YouTube channel and gives Master Classes in journalism at UCFB University in Wembley (London) and the Etihad stadium in Manchester.

He wrote the bestselling “A Season on the Brink”, an insider’s account of Liverpool’s 2004-05 Champions’ League winning campaign, updated later with the 2006 FA Cup victory. In November 2012, he published the first international biography of Pep Guardiola, based on conversations with him, his former players and Pep’s closest friends. It was shortlisted for Football Book of the Year both in the United Kingdom and Germany. The updated version, covering Pep’s period at Bayern Munich and his first two years at Manchester City was published in October 2018.