It’s 04:30 on a freezing winter morning and Jeff Stelling’s alarm pipes up. A few seconds later he’s out of bed.
That’s right, he’s all go from the first beep. No dilly-dallying – straight into a rigid routine and out of the hotel at a specific time. What did you expect from one of football’s most exuberant men?
Long before the sun will rub its bleary eyes, Stelling is already clocking in at talkSPORT’s base by London Bridge, preparing for four hours of banter with Ally McCoist and jousting with the nation’s callers from 6am. This is Stelling’s typical scene on Mondays, Tuesdays, and sometimes Wednesdays.
Colin from Cockermouth thinks Pep Guardiola should be sacked. Warren from Wetwang dials in to announce that Colin is, biologically speaking, a turd. Somebody from somewhere, thanks for your call mate but you’re mumbling like you’ve got a sock in your mouth.
You have to marvel at the man’s energy at 70. Daily Mail Sport speaks with him ahead of the launch of his new podcast, The Jeff Stelling Show with OLBG. Yes, you heard that correctly, he’s starting another presenting commitment. And he still talks, smiles, and laughs with all the gigawatts he poured into Soccer Saturday for 25 years until 2023.
‘I love it,’ he says. ‘I feel exactly the same as I did when I was in my mid-30s, my mid-40s, my mid-50s. I don’t see any reason to stop. As long as people ask me to do it, I’m going to carry on.
Jeff Stelling is launching a new podcast with OLBG – and he’s still as enthusiastic as ever
He is football broadcasting royalty and was made an MBE at Buckingham Palace in 2024
‘People will tell me, “you’re an old fart, you’re out of touch with modern views,” and sometimes they do now! Sometimes I get called a dinosaur – a pet hate, by the way. If anybody texts me, do not call me a dinosaur! It doesn’t matter if I’m 70 and you’re 17. Our opinions have got equal merit.’
At his heart, Stelling isn’t just a sports nut – he’s a gifted storyteller. In his new podcast with OLBG, he’ll have free reign to interview guests from across the sporting world, and he’s keen to hear their deeper stories.
‘It was an opportunity to do a podcast which wasn’t just sports-based but to find out a little bit about people’s lives,’ Stelling says.
‘It will be people from the world of sport but we may not concentrate on which games and trophies they’ve won. I’d like to hear their backstory. In this day and age, they’re so managed that we hear their answers about that game, that race, that match, but we don’t necessarily know them as human beings.’
This is Stelling’s first foray into podcasting and he’ll combine it with his role at talkSPORT. He names his dream guests as Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho – the latter an ‘enigma’ who he describes as ‘charming, graceful, funny, moody, offensive’.
The media landscape has changed a lot since he started at Sky in 1992, and almost unrecognisably since he began at the Hartlepool Mail after leaving school.
We don’t need to revisit the changes to Soccer Saturday. It’s been more than half a decade since Matt Le Tissier, Phil Thompson and Charlie Nicholas were let go and Stelling has expressed his disappointment at that before.
In fact, he was ready to quit in 2020 and again in 2022 before Sky convinced him to stay. He doesn’t pay too much attention to the beloved flagship show these days – mostly because he’s either attending a Hartlepool match or listening to the commentary – but he still likes what he sees.
Stelling’s new podcast will tell the deeper stories of people involved in sport, away from just their careers
He will combine this new commitment with his regular morning shows on talkSPORT
What he does fear more broadly is the idea of relentlessly ‘chasing a younger audience’. Sky Sports have been criticised for an output which many feel is engineered for social media clips rather than informing their audience. Ventures such as In the Box and Sky Sports Halo, alongside an interminable stream of influencer pundits spouting deliberately provocative views, have gone down like a lead balloon.
‘There’s a drive to get younger viewers, right throughout the media. I’ve never been convinced that was the right way to go,’ Stelling says.
‘We all know that kids today don’t watch as much TV as they used to. Young people will get their entertainment in different ways, so chasing them as an audience is misguided.
‘What you risk is alienating the audience you’ve already got by changing to suit a younger audience that isn’t [watching]. Stick with what you’ve got, stick with quality programming, quality presenters, quality pundits, and hopefully when the people who get their news on social media get to their mum and dads’ age, they might find themselves watching TV instead and enjoying that same quality product that their parents watched.’
However, he also admits: ‘Society moves on, times change, and I think TV has to reflect that.’
Despite his work – which requires decent preparation – he still finds time for his hobbies. Following Hartlepool is his joy, though as he lives in Hampshire with his wife Liz, the away games are usually more manageable.
He was honorary president at Pools from 2015 until May last year, when he resigned over frustrations at the new owner Raj Singh, who has now gone himself. One of Singh’s spikiest acts was to write to all the other National League clubs and demand that they ban Stelling from their hospitality offerings. It’s safe to say that backfired.
‘There are a lot of opposing clubs who ask me to come in the boardroom anyway,’ Stelling reveals. ‘But I don’t want to go in and cause any confrontation.
Stelling left Sky Sports in 2023 and is concerned about the direction they are going in
‘I’m still with the fans and I’m just a fan anyway. I’ve not got an issue with it.’
There aren’t many items left on his sports bucket list which he hasn’t ticked off and when asked, he replies that his main wish is to see Hartlepool play in League One again. They’re in with a shout at the National League play-offs this season, currently sitting ninth, but it’s a lot way back to the third tier.
If push came to shove, could Stelling do a job for them?
‘I played in the Hartlepool Sunday league,’ he says. ‘I started as an inside forward, a number 10 or eight you’d have said at the time, and as I got slower, I got moved back. So I ended up as a full-back.
‘I moved to London and played in a league called the Octopus League. The first year there were eight teams and somebody called it that. The next year, four more teams joined and we all looked really stupid.’
I give him carte blanche to compare himself to any footballer and without missing a beat, he looks me in the eye, utters the words ‘Paul Gascoigne,’ and lets out a hearty laugh. Of course he picked a showman. What else?
