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It was a story that sounded too fantastical to be true. When Ed Jervis approached journalist Gabriel Gatehouse at a podcast festival more than three years ago, it was to tell him about his grandfather, England’s legendary 1966 World Cup-winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks, and how he went down with a mysterious illness in the subsequent tournament, Mexico 1970.

England lost the game that Banks missed – a crucial quarter-final tie against West Germany – despite taking a 2-0 lead. And Jervis told Gatehouse, a former international editor of Newsnight who had become something of an expert in US conspiracy culture with his podcast and book The Coming Storm, that he’d heard that his grandfather had actually been poisoned. By the CIA.

Gatehouse was naturally sceptical, and yet he knew stranger things have happened.

“Because the CIA did some weird stuff pre-1975,” he says now. “The whole cold war history of the CIA is a pet hobby of mine, so I was like, it’s not impossible …”

Foreign intelligence v football

It also didn’t hurt that the project made him think of his favourite podcast, Wind of Change, Patrick Radden Keefe’s similarly improbable tale of the CIA’s possible involvement in a cold war protest song. What if, in order to prop up the popularity of the Brazilian dictatorship that was a bulwark against the spread of socialism in the western hemisphere, the CIA helped ensure Brazil won by taking out the goalkeeper of their biggest rivals? Could a foreign intelligence agency actually be responsible for 60 years of hurt?

What’s more, Gatehouse soon realised, it wasn’t simply a rumour that stemmed from the Banks family, but a US senator.

The resulting True Crime podcast from Audible, Foul Play, is a tale that fans of Wind of Change will not be disappointed in, taking us from doctors in Stoke-on-Trent to spies in Mexico, via government deep-throats, the CIA’s archive, Nasa scientists, the arrest of England captain Bobby Moore, and the curious starring role of a frozen food brand. JFK even makes a couple of appearances. And at one point, Jervis’s mother, Wendy, solves a murder.

What Gatehouse initially imagined might be an instantly disprovable theory became anything but. The investigation lasted three years. “You know, some conspiracy theories turn out to be true, and during the process I would swing wildly back and forth.”

Espionage and intrigue

Making the series made Jervis – a lifelong fan of his grandfather’s club Stoke City – realise how fertile football is for conspiratorial thinking: “You know, the referees are always against us, the world’s against you, and it’s so wildly implausible, but it helps you cope.”

In recent months, English football has even had its own espionage scandal, albeit on a less international scale, with Southampton disqualified from the Championship playoff final after it emerged they sent an intern to spy on the training sessions of opponents, including their semi-final rivals, Middlesbrough.

Fans of Tottenham Hotspur, meanwhile, still refer to “lasagnagate” – the notorious food-poisoning controversy that saw the club miss out on Champions League football on the final day of the 2005/06 season – in the hushed tones of those who were there that day in Dallas, and swear they saw something funny on the grassy knoll.

For Gatehouse, who is not a football fan, the power of sport – and therefore the reasons shadowy figures might want to manipulate it – was an eye-opener. After all, it wasn’t just Brazil’s dictatorship that was obsessed with winning the World Cup to curry favour with the population, but the British political establishment too. Hoping to ride the World Cup wave, Harold Wilson had called a general election for four days after the quarter-final. Having previously led in the polls, with England knocked out, he was voted out. Gatehouse points out that Wilson described it as a relegation.

“I really came to an understanding of how visceral and powerful football can be,” he says, “and why it makes total sense for an intelligence agency to go about fixing a football match to try and bolster a friendly regime. You could get a lot of bang for your buck as a spy.”

Audible investigates

Foul Play marks the latest in Audible’s stellar True Crime roster, with tales both fantastical and foreboding, tackling everything from a deep dive into the murky conspiratorial world of QAnon, Finding Q, to the real-world ramifications of the 2015 hack of the servers of infidelity website Ashley Madison, Exposed.

Next up is the incredible true tale SPLBERG, about the person who claimed to be the nephew of acclaimed director Steven Spielberg, and Influenced, a deep dive into the Tenet Media scandal, the Tennessee-based media company that unknowingly received nearly $10m (£7.4m) from the Russian state to fund rightwing influencers.

For Jervis, the three-year journey of Foul Play ended up being emotional as much as it was conspiratorial. He was close to his grandfather and experienced chest pains for years after his death in 2019. Most days, he says, he drives past a statue of him, and takes his daughter to the nearby Gordon Banks Sports Centre. He even lives in his grandfather’s old house, complete with football memorabilia on the walls that are only slowly giving way to a renovation.

“For many years I’d really struggled to deal with that grief,” he says, “and as I embarked on this journey, I thought great, maybe this is it, I can actually close a door on that.”

And in some ways it did, he says, but not as much as hoped. “Life and grief,” he adds, much like the story itself, “is not so straightforward.”

Your next obsession is waiting
Audible’s True Crime and Investigations include a vast collection of exclusive audiobooks, immersive podcasts, and gripping memoirs. Discover Audible’s True Crime and Investigations at audible.co.uk