Lee Hagan

Lee Hagan is a writer, creative producer, editor, and football obsessive whose career has moved across journalism, broadcasting, entertainment, advertising, digital content, and sports writing.

Any hopes he may once have harbored about playing football professionally were cruelly cut short by the inconvenient realization that he was not quite good enough. Rather than abandon the game, Lee found another way in, filling the goal-sized hole in his life by writing about football instead.

That instinct for writing has developed into a career spanning more than two decades. Lee has worked across editorial, broadcast, promotional, and branded content, with experience that includes the BBC, Turner Broadcasting, Adult Swim, 888Sport, and Taiwan News. His work has covered everything from scripts and promotional campaigns to social media storytelling, branded video, editorial production, copywriting, and audience-focused creative development.

At Turner Broadcasting, he worked as a producer for Cartoon Network and Boomerang’s Arabic channels, while his BBC work involved writing continuity and promotional copy for BBC Poland and BBC Entertainment. He also spent several years with Adult Swim as a writer, producer, and editor, helping develop and protect the brand’s distinctive voice across articles, blogs, social media, video, and other digital content.

His connection with sports writing goes back much further. While working as a copy editor at Taiwan News, Lee also conceived and wrote a regular sports column that took a satirical look at the personalities and events shaping the sporting world. That combination of journalism, humor, observation, and opinion remains central to his writing today.

He has also written commercially for 888Sport and, since 2011, has worked as a freelance senior creative, producing scripts, narratives, digital campaigns, audiovisual content, and branded storytelling for a wide range of audiences and platforms.

At The Sports Encounter, Lee writes The Straight Re(a)d, his take on the good, the bad, the ugly, and the many other adjectives football somehow manages to generate. His column combines informed observation, dry humor, sharp opinion, tactical curiosity, and a healthy suspicion of taking the game too seriously.

Whether he is writing about players, managers, tactics, controversies, strange decisions, supporter frustrations, or moments of genuine brilliance, Lee approaches football as both a lifelong fan and an experienced storyteller.

He holds a BA in Government from the University of Essex.

When he is not writing about football, there is a reasonable chance he is thinking about writing about football, often while his boss is under the impression that something entirely different is getting done.