The Beef: Daniel Storey

An interview with the Chief Football Writer of the i newspaper

Daniel Storey is a talented man.

He’s an excellent writer and an astute observer of football. He knows how to peel away the bullshit and tell the stories that actually mean something. It’s a surprisingly rare skill in today’s football media.

But Storey’s real talent is a hidden one. He has an extraordinary ability to pursue endurance whimsies that both make me envious and glad I’m not the kind of obsessive rottweiler that would actually put a year of effort into doing something so silly.

This season, he’s Doing the 92.

As the Chief Football Writer of the i, Storey has dedicated his season to visiting every ground in the Premier League and EFL (and Wembley) and writing a feature about them all. You can subscribe to it here and I recommend you do.

Am I envious? You bet. But it’s September now and you’d better believe I’d have checked already.

Not Daniel Storey.

So, like a local news reporter ambling alongside a charity runner for half a mile of some sort of groundhopping megamarathon, I headed for Yorkshire to see if I could get him to admit to blisters on his feet and a couple of aching knees.

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The Beef: Daniel Storey

It’s a Thursday night in the middle of September and I’m in the pretty North Yorkshire town of Harrogate for an evening of Yorkshire tapas – yes, really – and fourth-tier football.

Harrogate Town have established themselves in League Two of the EFL since their promotion in 2019/20, occasionally dipping into the uncomfortable fringes of a relegation battle but generally enjoying their first ever spell as a Football League club.

Their manager, then and now, is Simon Weaver. After an extensive non-league playing career, Weaver became the Sulphurites’ player-manager as far back as 2009. His father is the chairman now too. The Weavers have had an astounding impact on their club and adopted town.

Weaver the manager is being shadowed today. Storey is with him, scribbling notes and crafting what will undoubtedly be an acclaimed article about what really happens on an EFL matchday. It might be Doing the 92 in its purest form.

“I'm having one of the best days,” reports Storey over a plate of chips-and-gravy patatas bravas.

“When I started the project and came up with a big spreadsheet of ideas, there were ten or fifteen ideas that I could kind of transpose onto any club. One of them was to shadow a first team manager on matchday and tell readers about their whole experience.”

“I've just been to a pre-match meal with the players and heard the match preparation meeting. I've been to Simon's house today and he's talked me through what annoyed him at the weekend like I was a sounding board that he'd not had since then.”

If that sounds like manna from heaven for an obsessive football writer who understands the actual cultural depth of the game, Storey’s the right man for the job. After studying law and accounting, he realised that he didn’t want to be a lawyer or an accountant.

“I'm kind of a football nerd and a football romantic in one, so I went on this mad solo football trip to Africa and eastern Europe when I was 21 or 22,” he says. “I kept loads of notes even though they would be for nothing because I was not clever enough to realise I should be blogging about it.”

“I knew someone, Nick Miller, who was one of the kindest people in the world and got me enough ins at Football365. I sent letters to their mailbox and sent free articles, and eventually that escalated into some paid articles and snowballed from there.”

Storey made his name at Football365 and became an award-winning writer there before joining the i as its Chief Football Writer.

“We all grew up wanting to be a footballer, right? And then we quickly realised that wasn't going to happen. So I guess on some subconscious level, I was like, ‘Well, how can I get as close as I possibly can?’ And maybe writing was it.”

“There are ways of writing about it and still being a million miles away from football. There are people who do it that don't even seem to like football. And there are ways of trying to do it to get as close to the heart of it as you can. I am very much the second type.”

Like Storey, I live in the Midlands. I’m West. He’s East. But we’re here in North Yorkshire to catch up because his schedule is, frankly, all over the place. Doing the 92 is a colossal undertaking but one that fits Storey beautifully. So, how on earth did he get it signed off?

“I've always wanted to do the 92,” he says. “I'm that sort of guy. But I had an idea in the summer of 2022, like, maybe we could do this. It was at a time when we were getting quite good numbers in terms of subscribers on EFL content, which was clearly a help. If that didn't happen then I don't think the project could ever have existed.”

“I pitched it at that point and quite rightly my wonderful, lovely, generous editor, Ally McKay, said, ‘Yeah, that's great, but there's a World Cup in the middle of this season, you idiot.’ There's no mid-season international tournament this season. There's no senior men's tournament in the summer. So this is the season to do it.”

I’ve known Storey a long time so there were certain assumptions I’d made by this point about the motivations behind this season of graft and extravagance. One of them was that he likes to travel and explore, that part of his enjoyment of all these new discoveries was in the physical act of wandering to get to them.

He sees it a little differently. He is, he says, a collector. Wandering is a by-product of that and it just happens to have taken him to the Faroe Islands and Cameroon and the Ivory Coast, places where he’s been able to tick off his favourite work to date. Doing the 92 is his way of collecting every Premier League and EFL ground without needing to stay away from home very much.

“In the planning stages I went to see the EFL and pitch them the idea. Then I went to speak to about 55 or 60 of the 72 media officers or press officers at an EFL event at Stoke City. I was able to not exactly introduce the project at that point, but just sort of try and urge more access to tell stories.”

Storey signed himself up for a quite massive amount of work over the course of the season. 92 matches is one thing. He’s also writing a feature about every club, most of which won’t actually line up with the match but will still necessitate a journey. It’ll be worth it, if the early indications from his first few interviews are any marker.

Then there’s the planning for both and a podcast to boot, not to mention the social media promotion that’s essential to the success of any project like this. It seems to me that the sheer weight of outputs should be just as daunting, even to a writer who lives near the godforsaken M1, as committing to visit 92 versions of anywhere.

Storey tells me the i team has been supportive and I have no doubt the business case he put forward will have addressed his suitability for the task. 

There are two ways to look at the brief. The wrong way is to anchor the fortunes of 92 clubs in time, observing and documenting moments but ultimately missing what’s actually interesting about them. That’s telling one story 92 times. The other way is to try to tell 92 stories once. That’s where a project that any football writer could pull off becomes a Storey exclusive.

“People view football clubs through the prism of a 90-minute game,” he tells me. “They're playing on a Saturday or a Tuesday. They are not that. They are Tuesday mornings and Monday afternoons and Sunday nights.”

“Notts County is the second closest club to my house and they were a really good example. Their foundation runs these courses, in association with the club, for people in the local community who have been touched by cancer, either pre-treatment or post-treatment.”

“It was a genuinely humbling morning speaking to people who are going through that process talking about the fact that a free session put on by a foundation is the best moment of their week. So let's tell those stories as well. The legacy pieces are the ones that resonate longer, I think.”

That’s the thing with Storey. In an industry that’s becoming more disposable by both accident and design, it’s a requirement that journalists and writers are able to deliver numbers in the short-term.

As we discuss the process of getting a green light for Doing the 92, Storey is at pains to point out that he’s not free of that expectation. He has to write 92 pieces that hit the mark with supporters. But he doesn’t shy away from his own ambitions for the work.

He wants to unearth the unique nuggets that matter at clubs. While there are overarching ideas in his arsenal like today’s shadowing of Weaver, the majority will be more specific. There’s easy copy at all of them but when search engine results throw up his features in five years Storey wants them to have enough emotion, enough humanity, enough universal truth, to still be able to reveal something.

“The idea is to do the other 91 and then Nottingham Forest host Chelsea on the final day of the Premier League season. I’ll finish there and do a probably slightly saccharine piece about what the whole season has meant to me and ending up at my home, at the City Ground. Then the next day I’ll go to the Championship Play-off Final at Wembley and that'll be number 93 as a bonus.”

Late in our conversation, I make a confession.

I’m exhausted. It’s Thursday. I worked from Monday to Wednesday as usual before driving to Bradford this morning and zipping over to Harrogate this afternoon. It never crossed my mind to drive home this evening. Even in the context of completing this simple assignment, very likely my 1 of 92 this season, I will need to sleep before getting back on the road.

It’s only September but there’s no sense that the upcoming months will dull the enthusiasm. Storey is living the dream and thriving on a challenge that takes him under the skin of every league club in England. Where others might wilt through the winter, Storey will surge onwards fuelled by curiosity, a deep-rooted love for football and a bottomless desire to tell stories.

“I cannot believe that I'm sitting in this position and that goes for the project this season and the career in general,” Storey tells me as we prepare to settle the tab and make our respective tracks towards very different experiences of what turns out to be a terrific football match.

“I still have this kind of vast impostor syndrome, like someone's going to tap me on the shoulder one day and be like, ‘It's normal job time mate. You've had enough.’ But we'll see.”