What was your football highlight of 2024?
After everything we went through at Derby, promotion back to the Championship, and not just because it was success on the pitch, but because it felt like a club again where everyone, on and off the pitch, were pulling together as one.

Either on the pitch, or behind the scenes working in football, who is your person of 2024 and why?
Every grassroots referee out there. Despite being totally unrealistically expected to deliver the perfect performance, and having to take the moral high ground on the abuse that comes from players, parents, coaches, not to mention on social media, and getting paid a relative pittance for doing so, they keep ensuring games can happen.

Who in football would you like to give a Christmas present to and what would you gift them?
I’d give Paul Warne the goalscorer he’s wanted for the last two windows and with whom we'd now be comfortably top half, wondering about the playoffs, rather than bottom half looking nervously over our shoulders.

Who in the world of football should be on Santa’s naughty list and why? Everyone who thinks it's ok to have a pop at amateur referees, who pretty much do it for the love of the game, don’t pretend to be world class, but have to put up with dogs abuse when they get, in the opinion of the fan/player/coach, a throw in or goal kick decision wrong.

If you could make one change to football in 2025, to improve the way the game is played or governed, what would that change be and why?
Reduce the volume of international football, do away with the club world cup, and make the Champions League a competition for just the champions in a knockout format like it used to be. Then the Europa League could be what the UEFA Cup used to be, but again knock out football.

Off the field, what are going to be football’s main talking points in 2025?
If we mean in the media, it will be Man City's charges which, however they are found, will be accused of being fixed by one party or the other. And when that isn't in the media, it will be neverending car crash that is Man Utd, because that still has a lot to play out, and the media can't help but find something new about that club every week. The rest of us would love the media to cover clubs other than the big 6, but that's just wishful thinking.

Thomas Tuchel was recently appointed England’s men’s team manager, can he deliver the World Cup success the English fans so desperately crave?
Yes. It feels like this is a short-term appointment with the sole aim of winning the World Cup. England genuinely now have the talent to have a claim to be a contender, but Tuchel needs to do what Southgate repeatedly failed to do, no matter how far he got - beat a fellow contender.