Crowd Network is joining forces with former Lionesses Jill Scott and Karen Carney for its first podcast to be owned by female athletes.
Long Story Short was officially announced today at The Podcast Show. The podcast will be a platform to tell stories from throughout Jill and Karen’s decades-long friendship. With over 300 England caps between them, the pair will podcast together every week, bringing listeners stories from both on and off the pitch.
Jill Scott MBE is already well-known for her regular appearances on football podcast series The Overlap’s Stick to Football.
Since retiring from football in 2022, Jill has also been a regular fixture on TV. She won reality show I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! in 2022 and is a team captain on sports panel show A League Of Their Own.
Karen Carney OBE played for Arsenal, Chicago Red Stars, Chelsea, and Birmingham City, where she is a Hall of Famer.
She also appeared 144 times for England before retiring in 2019. Since then, she been Chair of the 2022 “Future of Women’s Football Review” for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, exploring how the Government can grow the game in the UK.
As well as being an ambassador for Visa and UEFA, including being on the UEFA Board, she is also the lead female pundit on TNT Sports and ITV Sport.
Unlike podcast competitors, Long Story Short is owned by Jill and Karen. This is part of Crowd’s model, providing former athletes ownership of their podcasts to open up post-professional retirement career paths.
Speaking exclusively to PodcastingToday about this model, Louise Gwilliam, Talent Manager at Crowd explained: “When we started Crowd, which was a kind of spinout from our time at the BBC about five years ago, we came from a background where we’d produced a lot of female-led content.
“Moving into Crowd as a commercial business, the question has always been when we can invest in female sport – not because we didn’t want to, but because the market wasn’t quite there.
“If we’d done it too early, the show wouldn’t have been a commercial success. But now, four or five years in, we feel like the timing is finally right.
“We’ve seen major success in men’s rugby – so we feel like now’s the moment to back female athletes properly.
“What’s different with our model is that instead of just making a podcast about them, we’re launching a business with them. That means commercial partnerships, sponsorships, live tours – real ownership of their narrative, by them.”
Louise agrees that it’s a big step for women’s sport, recalling recently looking at the top sports podcasts on Spotify and having to scroll down to number 29 before she found one with a female host, and even then, it was co-hosted with a man. She says it’s clear how underrepresented women still are in this space.
Talking about the podcast and expanding on Crowd’s strategy, Louise says: “We’re not just launching a female-owned podcast, we’re adding female presenters across our network.
“On our rugby podcast, for example, we’ve added three women to the team to cover the Women’s Six Nations and the Women’s World Cup.
It’s the same for cycling – we’ve got Geraint Thomas’ podcast, and now we’re launching a female cycling spin-off with two female presenters.
“As for the new show, it’s our first female-owned podcast. I was looking at who has the biggest fanbases and the best commercial pull right now, and we thought: who are the names we can build around?
“We’d had Jill Scott and Karen on as guests for a live show and watching them on stage, I just thought ‘that’s them’. I’ve made a lot of podcasts, and you need hosts with authenticity and chemistry. And they’ve got it.
“Karen’s the quieter one, very respected as a pundit, especially on the tactical side, but people haven’t really seen her personality. When she’s alongside Jill, she comes alive – witty, dry, really funny. And Jill is just pure energy and charisma. They balance each other perfectly.
“We got them together to record last week, and it was very funny. The show is about football, of course, but more than that, it’s about them. Their stories, their lives, and just being themselves. And they’re funny – really funny. I think people are going to love it.”
The first episode of Long Story Short will be available on all streaming platforms on Wednesday 11 June.
