Alison Bender is a freelance television and radio presenter specialising in football. With over 20 years of experience producing, presenting, reporting and hosting, Alison has worked for Chelsea TV, Real Madrid TV and a whole host of global sports channels including Sky Sports News, ITV, BBC and ESPN.
Whether its newsreading on Sky News, hosting a football awards ceremony, or reporting pitch side at a Premier League, Alison is completely comfortable on camera and shows great passion and enthusiasm for football.
As a global football expert and presenter, Alison has hosted live match-day shows, highlights programmes, debate shows, and call-in shows focusing on Premier League, Champions League, European, and World Football.
She’s interviewed all the greats from Pele and Beckham to Cristiano Ronaldo, Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho, while travelling the world hosting World Cups and European Championships.
She is now a content creator and influencer with 330k on TikTok where she helps young women who want to enter the football media industry.
Alison has a podcast called Talent Takes Time – speaking with inspirational figures in the sports media industry and has co-written a book Football She Wrote which has been shortlisted for the Times Football Book of the Year
Alison was one of the main anchors for the Premier League’s global channel for five seasons. Within that role she hosted a global football phone-in show “Fanzone”, presented daily news shows and worked on Match-day Live, reporting live team news and post match interviews with players and managers at Premier League matches.
Alison is comfortable presenting live match-day shows and highlights programmes as well as debate shows and call-ins. She’s hosted World Cups, European Championships, Premier League, Confederations Cups, African Cup of Nations, and Europa League shows as well as being a Champions League reporter since 2004.
With a strong news production background having spent 6 years producing news at CNBC Europe, Alison can package and edit. She relocated to Madrid to set up the English version of Real Madrid TV where she was responsible for the channel output and a team of six presenters.
She took on a similar role at Chelsea TV working closely within the club to deliver news shows, training ground reports and long form interviews.
Alison regularly appears on the radio and podcasts speaking about Premier League and European football, as well as doing paper reviews on TalkSport.
Following her business television background Alison regularly speaks at business of football events and hosts live events, charity days and award ceremonies. More recently she has started speaking and blogging about being a working mum of two small children.
Alison is just one of our brilliant sports talent at Great British Speakers