Guillem Balagué
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Guillem Balague (born Barcelona, Spain) is a Sky Sports Spanish football expert. He is a regular pundit on Sky Sports' show Revista de la Liga and has also written for some of Britain's newspapers as well as several popular Spanish newspapers.
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Journalism [edit]
In June 2008, Guillem launched his own personal website www.guillembalague.com [1] featuring a blog, news and the opportunity to interact with Guillem directly. Guillem predicted correctly that Cristiano Ronaldo was going to Real Madrid. In fact, he broke the news of a precontract agreement between Real Madrid and Ronaldo. This was confirmed by the former chairman Ramon Calderon. Guillem also reports for Sky Sports News from Spain. He consistently breaks exclusive stories regarding transfers to and from La Liga. Some other stories that Balagué broke were David Beckham's move to Real Madrid, Fernando Torres leaving Liverpool for Chelsea and David de Gea to Manchester United. He always denied that David Villa or David Silva were going to go to Liverpool as others pointed out.
Guillem is a journalist and has written for several English and Spanish newspapers. He is currently preparing a football documentary and also the first Pep Guardiola biography in English. He is very popular on social networking site, Twitter, with over 300,000 followers. He has written articles in British newspapers The Times and The Observer, as well as a weekly column in the free daily commuter newspaper The Metro commenting mainly on stories involving continental football.
He is also well known for his work with Spanish football newspaper AS and Spain's national radio station CADENA SER[2] where he features on phone-ins regularly.
From 2003-2006, Balague was responsible for match reports on the now defunct lachiesa.co.uk, website of Essex Sunday Morning outfit La Chiesa Del Corno.
Guillem was a co-host, along with Gabriele Marcotti, of TheGame, a football podcast hosted by The Times, for the 2007-2008 Premier League season, But for the 2008-2009 Premier League season he has been replaced by Phill Jupitus.
In November 2008 Guillem started his own Podcast in conjunction with GNB Radio 2 UAE. A weekly look at La Liga and various other features from his website.
Personal [edit]
Balagué speaks fluent English which he learned while at university in Liverpool. It was during this time Guillem became a close follower of Liverpool FC, subsequently writing a book on the club (see below).
He is a close friend of former Liverpool F.C. coach Rafael Benítez,[3] and in 2005 he wrote a book called 'A Season on the Brink: Rafael Benitez, Liverpool and the Path to European Glory' after their dramatic Champions League victory over A.C. Milan in Istanbul in 2005.[4][5]
Balagué has been promoting his latest work, a biography of Pep Guardiola, "Another Way of Winning", that was published in September 2012. He is currently researching a new book on Lionel Messi (similar to the Pep Guardiola book) which it is hoped will be published by Christmas of 2013.
Balagué supports the Barcelona based club RCD Espanyol.
