James Whitmore is a tactical writer and longform features journalist based in Manchester, England. He has covered European football for over twelve years, with a particular focus on the Premier League and the Champions League, and his work centres on the question that has driven football writing since Brian Glanville first sharpened a pencil: not what happened, but why. Whitmore writes the kind of piece that asks where a full-back was standing, why he was standing there, and what the manager three thousand miles away in Bavaria did the following week to exploit it. He read History at the University of Leeds, graduating in 2013, where he wrote a dissertation on the structural decline of English club football between 1985 and 1992 that his supervisor described, kindly, as "more readable than it had any right to be." He followed the degree with the FA Level 2 in Coaching Football, completed during a year in which he ran an under-15 side in West Yorkshire and, by his own admission, learned more about pressing triggers from a fourteen-year-old centre-back than from a year of reading Wenger interviews. His career began at the Yorkshire Evening Post, where he covered Leeds United through their wilderness years in the Championship and developed a sceptical eye for the relationship between ownership, finance, and the men on the pitch. From there he moved to FourFourTwo as a contributing tactical writer between 2017 and 2022, producing the magazine's long-running "Boardroom to Box" tactical columns and a series of monograph-length features on managers including Marcelo Bielsa, Roberto De Zerbi, and the early Mikel Arteta. He has also contributed to The Blizzard, These Football Times, and the BBC Sport longform vertical. His areas of expertise include Premier League tactical trends, Champions League knockout dynamics, build-up structure and pressing schemes, the back-three resurgence of the 2020s, manager profiling, transfer market structural analysis, and the long-tail consequences of UEFA coefficient reform. He writes for FootyGazette because, in his words, "British football writing has rarely needed an independent outlet more than it does right now." Off the page, Whitmore is a lifelong Sheffield Wednesday supporter — a fact he discloses in every piece in which it could plausibly matter — and a slow but persistent five-a-side midfielder. He lives in Chorlton with his partner and a rescue greyhound named Cruyff who has, despite the name, never executed a turn of any kind. You can reach James at [email protected].