The Sports Encounter is introducing a new voice to its football coverage as experienced writer, creative producer, editor, and lifelong football observer Lee Hagan joins TSE with a new recurring series, The Straight Re(a)d.
Football has never been short of opinions.
What it sometimes lacks is someone willing to look at the game without turning every conversation into tactical jargon, recycled talking points, or the kind of solemn analysis usually reserved for matters considerably more serious than whether a manager should have made a substitution five minutes earlier.
That is where Lee Hagan comes in.
Lee joins The Sports Encounter with The Straight Re(a)d, a new football series built around observation, opinion, storytelling, humor, and a willingness to look at the game from angles that do not always make their way into the conventional match report.
The series will explore football much as supporters experience it: brilliant one minute, baffling the next, occasionally infuriating, frequently hilarious, and almost never boring.
Who Is Lee Hagan?
Lee Hagan is a British writer, creative producer, editor, and storyteller whose professional career has crossed journalism, television, entertainment, digital media, advertising, sports content, and branded storytelling.
His experience includes work with the BBC, Turner Broadcasting, Adult Swim, 888Sport, and Taiwan News, alongside a long-running career as a freelance senior creative.
Across those roles, Lee has written scripts, developed promotional campaigns, produced audiovisual content, worked on social media storytelling, edited editorial material, created branded content, and helped shape distinctive voices for very different audiences.
That ability to find the right voice is particularly relevant to what he will bring to The Sports Encounter.
A Career Built Around Words, Stories, and Audience Attention
At Adult Swim, Lee worked as a writer, producer, and editor, helping develop and protect the brand’s identity across articles, blogs, headlines, social media, video, competitions, and other digital content.
His work with the BBC included writing navigation, continuity, and promotional material for BBC Poland and BBC Entertainment, where the challenge often involved finding fresh ways to make familiar programming feel worth another look.
At Turner Broadcasting, he produced content for Cartoon Network and Boomerang’s Arabic channels, while his experience with 888Sport brought sports-focused commercial writing into the mix.
His career has therefore moved across formats, audiences, tones, and platforms, but the common thread has remained storytelling.
Football Writing Is Not New Territory
Lee’s connection with sports journalism goes back much further than The Straight Re(a)d.
While working as a copy editor at Taiwan News, he also conceived and wrote a regular sports column that took a satirical look at the personalities and events of the day.
That combination of journalism, football, satire, personality, and observation now finds a natural new home at The Sports Encounter.
The Football Career That Never Quite Happened
Of course, writing was not necessarily Plan A.
Like countless people who have spent an unreasonable amount of their lives thinking about football, Lee once entertained hopes of playing the game professionally.
Those ambitions were cruelly cut short by one fairly inconvenient problem.
By his own admission, he wasn’t very good.
Rather than abandon football altogether, he found another route into the game and began filling the goal-sized hole in his life by writing about it instead.
That decision turned out rather better.
Years of professional writing, production, editing, and storytelling have given Lee something arguably more useful to a football columnist than a decent first touch: an instinct for finding the angle, the contradiction, the personality, and sometimes the absurdity hiding inside a story.
What Is The Straight Re(a)d?
The Straight Re(a)d is Lee Hagan’s new recurring football series for The Sports Encounter.
It will not simply tell readers who scored, who assisted, who was booked, or what a manager said at the press conference afterward.
Those facts matter, but football rarely ends with the facts.
There are decisions worth questioning, performances worth pulling apart, narratives worth challenging, tactical ideas that change matches, personalities who shape clubs, supporter frustrations that deserve attention, and moments so strange that sometimes the only sensible response is to ask what on earth everyone involved was thinking.
That is the territory The Straight Re(a)d intends to explore.
What Readers Can Expect From The Straight Re(a)d
The series will range across modern football rather than being restricted to one club, league, competition, or type of story.
Readers can expect Lee to explore:
- Major matches and the stories behind the scoreline
- Players, managers, and the personalities shaping football
- Tactical decisions and emerging trends
- Controversies and questionable decisions
- Media narratives and conventional football wisdom
- Supporter debates and frustrations
- The strange, funny, and occasionally ridiculous side of the game
- Stories that deserve another look after everyone else has moved on
Some editions will analyze.
Some will challenge an accepted narrative.
Some will ask uncomfortable questions.
And some may simply stop for a moment to appreciate how gloriously strange football can be.
The constant will be Lee’s voice: informed but accessible, opinionated without becoming predictable, serious when the subject deserves it, and funny when football inevitably provides the opportunity.
More Than Another Football Column
The arrival of The Straight Re(a)d also reflects the broader editorial direction of The Sports Encounter.
TSE continues to build beyond straightforward scores, results, and breaking news by creating space for recognizable writers, distinctive perspectives, original analysis, historical context, and editorial voices readers can return to because of who is writing as much as what they are writing about.
Lee’s background makes that fit particularly natural.
He understands journalism. He understands editorial discipline. He understands television, digital storytelling, audience attention, brand voice, humor, and the difference between merely communicating information and making somebody want to keep reading.
He also understands something equally important.
Football provides an almost endless supply of material.
The good.
The bad.
The ugly.
Continue the TSE Newsroom Story
And the many other adjectives that will undoubtedly become necessary as The Straight Re(a)d develops.
The Straight Re(a)d Is Coming to The Sports Encounter
The first edition of The Straight Re(a)d will be published shortly on The Sports Encounter.
It will begin a recurring series in which Lee takes his own look at the matches, personalities, arguments, controversies, tactics, narratives, and moments shaping football.
Not simply what happened.
But what was interesting about it.
What might have been overlooked.
What deserves another look.
And, every now and then, what on earth everyone involved was doing.
Welcome to The Straight Re(a)d.
About Lee Hagan
Lee Hagan is a UK-based writer, creative producer, editor, and football columnist with professional experience spanning journalism, broadcasting, entertainment, sports content, digital media, copywriting, and branded storytelling.
His career includes work with the BBC, Turner Broadcasting, Adult Swim, 888Sport, and Taiwan News, alongside more than a decade working as a freelance senior creative.
Lee holds a BA in Government from the University of Essex.
Alongside his work for The Sports Encounter, he publishes independently through his own website and The False 9 to 5.
Website: LeeHagan.com
LinkedIn: Lee Hagan
X: @luanshyaman
Substack: The False 9 to 5
About The Sports Encounter
The Sports Encounter is an independent sports publication covering major events, athletes, teams, competitions, and the stories shaping sport around the world.
Alongside breaking news and match coverage, The Sports Encounter focuses on original reporting, analysis, historical context, distinctive perspectives, and journalism that gives readers something beyond information they can find everywhere else.
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