OUR STORY
We are Lee Wingate and Paul Watson, both professional and accredited football journalists from the United Kingdom with a love for the beautiful game across the world.
We both took very different routes into football, with Lee working as a sports translator for football clubs across Europe before moving into podcasting. Paul, meanwhile, established himself a prominent voice in football media after coaching in far-flung places like Micronesia and Mongolia, publishing best-selling books about his adventures.
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Lee first became aware of Paul thanks to an article in FourFourTwo magazine all about the 2016 Greenlandic Football Championship, the shortest season in world football at one week long. It was that love of the quirky and obscure that prompted Lee to found The Sweeper in 2021 and start blogging online.
Paul soon became aware of The Sweeper through social media! Recognising the potential upside of joining forces in an industry largely obsessed with the same countries, leagues and players, he got in contact. And the rest, as they say, is history. We have been working together since 2023.
THE HOSTS
LEE WINGATE
Lee’s love of football is matched only by his obsession with travel and languages. He studied French and German at the University of Bath, spending a year as an Erasmus student, before graduating with a degree in Interpretation and Translation in 2012.
He then embarked upon a career as a freelance sports linguist, taking on several high-profile gigs in London such as translating for English Premier League football players and working as an interpreter at the 2013 Champions League final between German clubs Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund.
In 2014, he swapped his native England for pastures new in Austria, settling in Vienna where he continued to work remotely as the head English translator for two German Bundesliga clubs - Borussia Dortmund and TSG Hoffenheim. But secretly, little by little, it was the local Bundesliga that soon stole his heart and in 2018 co-founded The Other Bundesliga, an English-language podcast that quickly established itself as the face of Austrian football internationally.
Recognising the immense interest in football outside of the big leagues, Lee founded The Sweeper in 2021 and began building it into one of the most respected voices in world football. As of 2026, he works as a full-time journalist and podcaster.
PAUL WATSON
Paul started his career at Football Italia writing about Italian football for an English language audience before taking the unorthodox career move of moving to the Federated States of Micronesia to coach the Pohnpei football team.
The Pohnpei adventure was filmed for a documentary called The Soccermen, and Paul wrote a book called Up Pohnpei, which was released in 2012. The next stop was Ulaanbaatar, where he began coaching and ended up co-owning a Mongolian Premier League football club called Bayangol.
In 2018, Paul was one of the tournament organisers for the CONIFA World Football Cup in London - a tournament for nations, states and peoples not recognised by FIFA.
Since then, Paul has worked as a freelance journalist, focusing on stories of football off the beaten track. He appears regularly on Guardian Football Weekly and TalkSport, and has written for publications such as ESPN and Four Four Two.
Paul joined The Sweeper in 2023 after bonding with Lee over a mutual love of Greenlandic football. Now, focusing full-time on The Sweeper, Paul has also written a book called Around The World in 80 Clubs that tells the stories of lesser-known football teams around the world.