Andy Goode
Sports dinners, awards nights and corporate-hospitality events live or die on the person at the front of the room. A flat host kills the night; a sharp one carries the brand. Audiences raised on broadcast rugby coverage can tell within minutes whether the voice in front of them actually knows the game or is reading a brief.
Andy Goode is a former England fly-half, Premiership Rugby Hall of Fame inductee and broadcaster who hosts corporate events, after-dinner functions and award ceremonies for organisations using rugby and elite sport as a hospitality or culture platform.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Andy Goode
- A name and voice that audiences already know from broadcast rugby coverage, which shortens the trust-building gap between the speaker and the room on the night.
- Premiership Rugby Hall of Fame status and a five-title Leicester Tigers career give the credibility a rugby audience tests for in the first two minutes of any after-dinner slot.
- Co-hosts The Rugby Pod with Jim Hamilton and Dan Biggar, so he brings live, current insight into the modern professional game, not nostalgia from a finished career.
- Comfortable across formats: keynote, after-dinner, awards host, panel moderator, Q&A with current players, which suits sponsors and hospitality programmes that need one person across a full event.
- When the brief calls for it, he speaks substantively on team performance, recovery from setback and reinvention after sport, drawing on a career that included two retirements, multiple club moves and a post-playing media reinvention.
Biography highlights
- Five English Premiership titles with Leicester Tigers (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007).
- Two Heineken Cup winners’ medals (2001, 2002).
- 17 England caps between 2005 and 2009, debut against Italy in the Six Nations.
- 423 senior club appearances and 3,934 points across Leicester Tigers, Saracens, CA Brive, the Sharks, Worcester Warriors, Wasps and Newcastle Falcons.
- Second-highest points scorer in Premiership Rugby history and former record holder.
- Inducted into the Premiership Rugby Hall of Fame, June 2021.
- Co-host of The Rugby Pod with Jim Hamilton and Dan Biggar; rugby pundit and analyst for major UK broadcasters including BT Sport and TalkSport.
Biography
Few fly-halves have stood in front of a Premiership pack across as many seasons as Andy Goode. He arrived at Leicester Tigers from school in 1998 and was inside the squad through the club’s record run of four straight Premiership titles, then returned for a second spell that produced a fifth title in 2007 and made him the all-time leading points scorer in the league, a record he held until Charlie Hodgson overtook him.
The career that followed is what gives the after-dinner material its range. Saracens, then Brive in the French Top 14, a short spell with the Sharks in Super Rugby, then Worcester Warriors, Wasps and Newcastle Falcons. Across 423 senior games he scored 3,934 points and earned 17 England caps between 2005 and 2009. He was inducted into the Premiership Rugby Hall of Fame in 2021.
The second career has been built on the same instincts that ran a back line for nearly two decades. Goode reads the game on air the way he ran it on the pitch, which is why The Rugby Pod, co-hosted with Jim Hamilton and Dan Biggar, has become the most-listened-to rugby podcast in the world. He works as a pundit and analyst across major UK broadcasters and is a familiar voice to anyone following the modern professional game.
For corporate audiences he is most often booked as a host, after-dinner speaker or awards MC for events where rugby is the hospitality currency. The substance, when the brief asks for it, is the same substance the playing career rested on: a team’s habits under pressure, the discipline of recovery from setback, and what an elite career looks like when the playing chapter ends.
Key speaking topics
- Professional rugby and the modern game
- Team performance under pressure
- Career reinvention after elite sport
- After-dinner speaking and event hosting
- Awards and ceremony hosting
- Panel moderation and player Q&A
Ideal for
- Corporate hospitality programmes built around rugby (Six Nations, Premiership Rugby, Rugby World Cup)
- Sponsor activations and client dinners during the rugby calendar
- Industry award ceremonies and gala dinners requiring a recognisable sports host
- Sports clubs, rugby unions and member organisations running fundraising events
Audience outcomes
- A room that warms up quickly because the host already has the audience’s recognition
- A credible voice on the current state of the professional game, not generic sports anecdotes
- A storyteller who can hold the centre of a long-format dinner without slipping into stand-up
- For motivational briefs: a first-person account of resilience, repeated reinvention and elite-sport team culture