‘Oh, it’s crazy,” Jeff Stelling says wryly as he ticks off the list of towns he is visiting on tour, like a 68-year-old football broadcaster turned rock star. “I’ve been plodding my way from Southampton to Southend,” and then on to Croydon before, “[this] week it’s Truro, Yeovil and Christchurch. It goes on and on but, while I wouldn’t say it was rough round the edges, it will get better as the weeks pass. At least, that’s the hope.”
At every venue, including the Scarborough Spa and the Winding Well Theatre in Chesterfield a few weeks from now, wags in the audience will punctuate An Evening with Jeff Stelling by yelling out a favourite catchphrase. “On the opening night in Southampton,” Stelling says, “it happened half a dozen times, en route to the theatre and within the theatre as well. Everybody shouts ‘Unbelievable Jeff!’ as if they’re the first to have said it.”
Stelling emits a sighing laugh full of warmth for his great friend Chris Kamara, who would holler “Unbelievable Jeff!” when reporting on a goal he had just seen, or a red card he had missed, during the many years they worked together on the once inimitable, but now muted, Sky Sports programme Soccer Saturday. Stelling hosted the bizarre, but beloved, show for 25 years as he barked out scores from the English and Scottish leagues while four former footballers watched games on silent monitors. Reporters, like Kamara, would turn away from matches they were covering to offer live snippets from lower league grounds.
Stelling, a master broadcaster, held everything together with a deft touch as the jokes and wordplay flowed alongside the scores and stats. But the last few years, away from the cameras, had become acrimonious. Last May, Stelling hosted his final show and slipped away to a different life.
He is now able to launch this tour and host a new podcast, which began with Kamara as the opening guest and continues this week when Stelling meets James Milner. Stelling talks in detail about the podcast, Football’s Greatest, and he is moving when reflecting on Kamara’s increasingly successful struggle to overcome his apraxia of speech disorder.
But it feels important to start with Stelling’s difficult last few years at Sky. “I had the most fantastic run on the show,” he says. “I made the greatest mates and was paid well for one of the best jobs in the world. But the show was heading in a direction which meant it wasn’t quite the same. Even though I’d been there a long time, I felt some of my views weren’t considered at all. Every week I was fighting a battle. I got tired of fighting and it was making me ill.”
It’s jolting to imagine the avuncular and serene Stelling being made to feel ill by a staple of the football landscape in Soccer Saturday. But I hear the emotion and care with which he picks his words. “Eventually, I went to Sky’s management and said: ‘This is making me unwell. I’ve got to step away from it.’”
I interviewed Stelling in 2020 when he was reeling from the sacking of his close friends Phil Thompson, Matt Le Tissier and Charlie Nicholas from Soccer Saturday. Sky was intent on increasing diversity among its broadcasters and pundits. There have been further cuts and, at the end of last season, the venerable commentator Martin Tyler and Geoff Shreeves, who did most major post-match interviews on Sky, were eased out. Stelling understands the need to encourage diversity but was his distress accentuated by the fact so many of these men were his friends?
“They were,” he agrees. “But it was more because I’d become unclear [about Sky’s direction] before Shreevesy or Martin left. Soccer Saturday used to be distinctive and we had a great team of reporters who would do off-the-wall features.
“But it reached the point where I would go home Saturday [after the show] and never go out with my wife or family because I was so worn out. Sunday, I felt ill with the stress and that extended into Monday and I’d start work on the next show on Tuesday still feeling stressed out. All the time you were flat on the floorboards just to keep the show afloat.”
Stelling pauses. “I’m almost ashamed to say it because my dad worked in a steelworks and would come back from his shift covered in grime and muck and absolutely exhausted. He would never have allowed me to say I was shattered after a TV show. But I felt it was making me ill so I had to step away.”
The preceding years, for Stelling, were “an absolute joy. We all loved working on the show – from me and the panel to the producer and backroom staff. We were a real team.”
Stelling was the linchpin and Sky wanted to retain him. “I wasn’t constantly at management’s door but one or two big decisions were made, and I can’t say what they were, and I wasn’t even consulted. That’s their right but I felt I’d been there so long that maybe I’d earned the right to be asked. It annoyed me and there were two occasions where they almost diametrically opposed my views. I was disregarded and the joy was sucked out of it.
“Now I’ve got a life where I make my own decisions or the company, TalkSport, ask: ‘Is there anything you want on the show? Any guests you want?’ What a joy to be treated like this. I don’t want to be anti-Sky, though. Sky were wonderful to me and there’re still some great people there, in management as well.”
Stelling and Ally McCoist make a winning combination on TalkSport’s breakfast show on Mondays and Tuesdays and he loves radio. He also made a return to the screen when hosting Amazon Prime’s frenetic Every Goal, Every Game. Stelling listens when I read out Barney Ronay’s description of it as “the most painful, jarring and genuinely exhausting football programme ever devised … without context … there is no narrative here, just noise.”
“I get that,” Stelling says. “I totally take that on board because there’d be a goal and a shout but no specific person had been watching that game to give it real context. From Amazon Prime’s point of view it was a toe in the water and, if they did it regularly, the issues would soon be ironed out. They approach things incredibly professionally and I really enjoyed doing a second programme for them which was a live game: Chelsea–Crystal Palace. I enjoyed being back in the thick of it.”
Stelling’s latest passion is his podcast and he and Kamara are typically engaging in the first episode. They discuss great partnerships, knockabout memories of working together and how Kamara’s apraxia of speech affected him so profoundly. Kamara tells Stelling how it became “heartbreaking” to appear on Soccer Saturday because he was too afraid to tell anyone he was battling to string words together.
When did Stelling first suspect Kamara had a then unknown ailment? “There wasn’t a specific moment but Kammy is such a vibrant character and his joie de vivre was draining away. His speech was badly affected but it was heartbreaking that social media was full of people saying: ‘Has Kammy been at the drink?’
“Dementia caused by heading a football was my first concern. When Kammy finally said it was something totally different I was almost relieved. But relief was tempered for Kammy because in this country there was no cure. He was told it’s only going to get worse. It became a living hell for him.”
Did Stelling talk to Kamara before his diagnosis? “I didn’t as I wasn’t sure if he was aware of how much he had deteriorated. Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t want to be the one to point that out to him.”
Happily, after treatment in Mexico, Kamara has made remarkable progress and he talks fluently on the podcast. He will soon return to Mexico in the hope that the pace of his speech will also be enhanced. Stelling and Kamara made a television programme last year in Sri Lanka which centred on their conversations while driving along some of the world’s most dangerous roads.
“There was no prospect of doing that a year earlier,” Stelling says, “and so it was a joy we could talk day after day.”
Stelling was amused that, while waiting for their flight from Heathrow, “a middle-aged lady raced over. She said: ‘Kammy, Kammy can I have your photograph?’ Kammy obliged. She spotted me and said: ‘Oh! You’re the other one!’ Then, on the way back, most of the customs officers recognised us: ‘Hi Kammy, hi Jeff.’ At the end of the customs hall a female officer looked at us and asked: ‘Who are they? The male customs officer said: ‘That’s Chris Kamara … and the other one.’ I’m very happy to take that role with Kammy.”
His laughter is genuine but it will be intriguing to hear Stelling talk to Milner in the second episode of the podcast because they had not met before. He enthuses about Milner’s wit and insights into life as a Premier League footballer, aged 38, and Stelling reveals that Arsène Wenger would be his fantasy guest.
Stelling’s podcast will certainly be free of the bile and prejudice Joey Barton spewed out recently. In his depressing attacks on women in football, the suspicion grew that Barton was also trying to publicise his own podcast.
Has Stelling followed the Barton furore? “Oh, yes. You can’t avoid it, can you? I’ve worked with Joey a couple of times and I enjoyed his company then.
“But you’ve absolutely nailed it. Initially, I’m sure this was to gain some traction for the podcast. Unfortunately it’s become a monster and totally wrong to say women have no right to talk about football.”
Stelling’s disbelief is plain but he remembers how, when he was a boy, his sister Sue, who was six years older than him, took him to watch his beloved Hartlepool. “She would honestly be the only woman in the ground. There were no toilet facilities for women and it was very foreboding and unwelcoming.”
Did the men make comments about Sue? “Oh yeah! And they weren’t as mild as that. It was a totally sexist environment. To see a woman at football was a shock and they didn’t understand she was just my big sister doing me a massive favour in taking me to the game. I’m so glad that’s changed because you now see so many women and families at football matches.”
It’s fitting that Stelling asked Bianca Westwood, his former Sky colleague, to host his evenings on tour and he praises the depth of her knowledge and professionalism. “Fifty years ago, a woman wouldn’t have had an opinion on football because most had never been to a live game because it was such a forbidding, alien atmosphere. But times have changed, thank God.”
Stelling remains exemplary and, in terms of future television work away from Sky, he says: “If anyone offered me a chance to host something I would say: ‘Thanks very much. Yes, please.’ But there are young, thrusting presenters coming through and, if they don’t come to me, I’ve had a great run. Everything is a bonus these days.”
