Guillem Balague has been a key fixture in Sky Sports’ coverage of Spanish football for 20 years. He is now the presenter of the highlight show Revista de La Liga, as well as regular pundit at the weekend. He is also the UK Correspondent for AS, the Madrid-based Spanish sports newspaper and the Spanish radio Cope. His work appears regularly on Yahoo.com, the biggest news website in the world, and has a blog on Skysports.com. He has covered the last two World Cups for the BBC.
He also 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, and was updated in 2018 with his time in Bayern Munich and Manchester City.
In 2013, he wrote the first authorised account of the life of Leo Messi, full of insight and conversations with coaches, players, teachers and his family. The four years of his time with Pep Guardiola were analysed by Pep himself exclusively. The book, ‘Messi’ was shortlisted for the Football Book Award in the UK in 2014 and has been updated in 2018.
As well as two football diaries (of the 2012 European Championships and the 2014 World Cup), he published the Official History of FC Barcelona in the autumn of 2014.
In November 2015, he published ‘Cristiano Ronaldo, the Biography’ which won the Football Book of the Year Award at the British Sports Book Awards and the Best Football Book of 2016 in Poland.
He has written or worked for The Telegraph, Marca, The Times, The Observer, Talk Sport, BBC, Cadena Ser, 442, World Soccer, Champions magazine, and many other publications in Spain, Britain and worldwide.
He completed his journalism course at the Universitat Autònoma de Bellaterra (Barcelona) in the summer of 1991. Thereafter, he moved to Liverpool where he worked as a correspondent on the oldest newspaper in Europe, Diari de Barcelona, and the magazines Lecturas and Cambio 16, amongst others.
He is the Director of Football of Biggleswade United, a role that fills him with joy like no other.