The Jeff Stelling Show

Sean Dyche is out of the game by choice - “fun employed”, as he puts it - and he has a theory about why modern football has stopped making sense to him.
It isn’t Pep Guardiola. He’s clear about that. Guardiola never told anyone to copy him, does it with exceptional players, and Dyche rates him. The problem is everyone else.
He watches League One and League Two sides being pressured into playing out from the back, goalkeepers who want nothing less than the ball on the edge of their own box, and games where both teams try to play for forty-five minutes, it finishes goalless at half time, and the goals only arrive once somebody abandons the plan ⚽️
Then they go up, they get relegated, and they say they played the right way 🤷‍♂️
His answer to that, which he has been shouting at radios since his playing days: stay up playing the wrong way 🙌
He tells Jeff Stelling that supporters have been brainwashed into believing there’s only one acceptable style, and that brand has become more important than getting the job done. His example of good management is Mikel Arteta - not for the philosophy, but for ripping it up when it wasn’t going to win him anything. He’d love Arteta to admit it out loud 🏆
Also in this episode: the 6-0 at Chelsea that was the lowest moment of his management career, and the two weeks that took him from there to beating Liverpool. Being nominated for manager of the month for Nottingham Forest on a Thursday and told he should be sacked on the Friday. Why he says he instigated his own exit at Everton. The three free transfers that built Burnley, a training ground promised standing on a bridge, and a community department that grew from one person to 110.
Plus a penalty in an FA Cup semi-final having not scored in four years, Elton John introducing him from the stage, and a working theory on how to get anyone into curry 🍛
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Chris Kamara spent a weekend convinced he'd lost his job. He'd been standing in the corner of the pitch at Portsmouth rather than up on the gantry, back to the game, when the red card was shown. Jeff came to him live. He had no idea it had happened 🤷‍♂️
He rang the producer on the way home. Ben Shephard told him they were showing it on Goals on Sunday and Kamara begged him not to. By Monday morning it was on Chinese television, Dutch television and Fox Sports 😅
He's back with Jeff Stelling for the first time since leaving Soccer Saturday, and they go through all of it on this episode of The Jeff Stelling Show 🙌
On his health:
He's open about where he is now. Three years ago he couldn't have done a show like this. He's been to Monterrey in Mexico three times for treatment on his brain, and his family have told him that's enough - that he should stop chasing the person he was and accept the person he is now ❤️
He describes what it was like when the apraxia first took hold. Thinking he had dementia or Alzheimer's. Knowing the words were there but not being able to get them from his brain to his mouth. Doing Soccer Saturday through lockdown with his memory going, and being so embarrassed he wanted to walk away from everything 😢
What got him through was asking for help, which he calls the best thing he ever did. He says he never believed in mental health until it happened to him, and that bottling it up does nobody any good. He's now patron of six charities and is pushing for AI funding to support children who can't speak, because speech and language therapists are spread so thin that most see a child once every six months 🙏
And the rest of it:
José Mourinho ringing him at home the night he'd refused to say a word to 5 Live after Chelsea's controversial game against Burnley - and telling him he was coming on Goals on Sunday tomorrow and Kamara was going to say it for him. Then Sean Dyche ringing an hour later with the opposite version!
Getting Bradford promoted as caretaker from 16th in the table, with fans on the pitch at Hull and a winner in the fifteenth minute of added time 🏆
Growing up in Middlesbrough in the sixties, when the police would arrest his father because neighbours told them a burglary was probably down to the black family round the corner.
Plus the stories of Jeff and Kammy together - Gaelic football, Sri Lanka, a broken Aston Martin, 32 miles in a pair of loafers, and the only man alive who still gets away with calling Jeff Stelling "Carly" 🤣
If anything here sounds familiar, you don't have to deal with it alone. Samaritans are free, 24 hours a day, on 116 123.
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David Seaman was 39, captain of Arsenal, and had just played in an FA Cup final. He didn't know it was his last game for the club 😢
He'd been on year-to-year deals for four years, which suited him and suited Arsenal. Every summer Arsène Wenger would ring with an offer. This time Seaman was on a beach in Portugal when the call came: stay as third-choice goalkeeper, take over as goalkeeping coach from Bob Wilson - and accept a 75% drop in wages. He said no, went to Manchester City, and found a club where nobody knew what the players were eating 😅
That's one story in an hour of them on this episode of The Jeff Stelling Show 🙌
He talks about arriving at Arsenal in 1991 to replace a fans' favourite, and being sung at by the supporters who'd soon be cheering him - "Lukic is better than Seaman, you'll never play for Arsenal" - while his contract was already signed. He explains how Sir Alex Ferguson rang him first, and how close he came to being a Manchester United goalkeeper instead 😱
He describes walking into a dressing room with Tony Adams, Steve Bould, David O'Leary, Nigel Winterburn and Lee Dixon, and having to prove himself on the training pitch before any of them would have him. Eighteen goals conceded in a title-winning season. Adams still calling himself invincible despite missing the one game they lost - because he was in prison 😳
Then Wenger arrives. The players had never heard of him, thought he looked more like a schoolteacher than a manager, and were openly suspicious. Within weeks the diet, the nutrition and the training had changed everything. Seaman saw him lose his temper exactly once, at Old Trafford, five goals down at half time, with Ray Parlour laughing like a schoolboy in the corner 🤣
There's the save Peter Schmeichel called the best he'd ever seen, and why Seaman's face was deadpan afterwards. Three penalties saved against Sampdoria. Nadal at Euro 96, and watching Stuart Pearce walk up knowing what had happened in 1990. Nayim from the halfway line. Ronaldinho, and standing on the pitch with half an hour still to play wondering whether he was about to be treated the way Beckham had been in 1998 💔
And the moment that still stands as his worst in football - which isn't any of those. It's being released by Leeds at 19, by his own club, with no idea what he'd do instead. He tells the Arsenal academy players the same thing now: follow my path, look where I got to 🙌
Plus David Raya, Ben White and the art of blocking goalkeepers at set pieces, why goalkeepers will never be good with their feet, Bob Wilson's coaching tricks, the origin of "Safe Hands", and a 42lb carp 🎣
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Tony Pulis spent five seasons keeping Stoke City in the Premier League and was told the whole way through that he was ruining football. Arsène Wenger called his side a rugby team. Now Arsenal are champions, and set pieces played a huge role in how they got there 🏆
In this episode of The Jeff Stelling Show, Pulis reveals the advice Sir Alex Ferguson gave him when Stoke went up, why he made things up to wind his players up before games, and what he really thinks about directors of football ⚽️
He also talks about Gillingham's play-off defeat against Man City that still bothers him, and why academies are failing the kids who don't make it 😔
Over a thousand games as a manager. Never relegated.
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Steve McClaren rang David James before he signed for Portsmouth and told him he wanted to look at other goalkeepers. James knew exactly what that meant 😳
Eighteen months later he was back in the England squad. At 39, he finally played his first World Cup match 🙌
Jeff Stelling sits down with one of the most recognisable goalkeepers of the Premier League era for a conversation that covers the England years, the 'Calamity James' label, and the phone call he still hasn't forgiven 📞
James explains why Robbie Fowler's missed penalty against Middlesbrough in 2005 may have created Pep Guardiola's Manchester City. He talks about being sent up front as an emergency striker with seven minutes left and no warning. He describes falling out with the press, blocking journalists entirely, and the conversation in his kitchen with a stranger that changed how he understood his own game 🧠
He's also candid about being told the club didn't want sports psychology mentioned in the dressing room, about conceding a goal ruining his weekend even in a 5-1 win, and about why he thinks this England squad is technically better than the golden generation he played in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
Plus: Fabio Capello's flip chart, the save he rates above Gordon Banks against Pelé, why Gianluigi Buffon is his greatest of all time, and what's stopping former England players from getting coaching jobs ⚽️
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