Jeff Stelling

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Jeff Stelling is a British sport television presenter, currently hosting Soccer Saturday and Monday Night Football on Sky Sports.

Jeff Stelling on Soccer Saturday

Stelling was brought up in the North-East town of Hartlepool, and is a Life long supporter of local Football League Two team Hartlepool United. After an apprenticeship on the local newspaper his first broadcasting position was as a reporter on Middlesbrough F.C. on Radio Tees. He was a sports presenter on London's LBC Radio in the early 1980s before moving to BBC Radio 2's weekend sports programme Sport On 2, covering the Los Angeles and Seoul Olympic games. He later spent time as a sports newsreader at TV-am, Channel 4, Eurosport and British Satellite Broadcasting before moving to Sky in 1992 to present coverage of horse racing, snooker and darts.

In 1994 Stelling became presenter of Sports Saturday, which became Soccer Saturday in 1998, hosting a programme lasting up to six hours of football discussion and live reports on the afternoon's games with a panel of pundits including George Best, Frank McLintock, Chris Kamara and Rodney Marsh, the former England striker whose argumentative nature led to entertaining viewing until his dismissal from Sky Sports in early 2005. Much of the programme's popularity is put down to Stelling, The Guardian praising him for "exceptional professionalism and élan"^[1] and When Saturday Comes describing him as "perhaps the best sports presenter on British TV".

Stelling rarely appears on terrestrial television, despite known offers to become the face of ITV Sport, although in 2003 he won a sports presenter special edition of The Weakest Link. In 2005, Stelling was offered by the BBC to front Score — their new Saturday results service. Stelling rejected the offer and the job was given to Ray Stubbs

At the start of the 2005-06 Premiership football season, Stelling replaced Ian Payne as the host of Sky Sports' Ford Monday Night Football programme. However, Stelling's appointment coincided with a new, shorter format of the programme, with Stelling presenting the show live from the ground of that evening's game. Previously, the show had been presented from a studio, and had featured some coverage of the prior weekend's games. Moreover, in previous years on Monday nights without a live game, a "Monday Night Football Special" would be broadcast, which included only the analysis from the weekend's games. This appears to have been dropped from the 2005-06 season, indicating that Stelling's appointment is to a smaller role than that held by his predecessors.

[edit] Dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions

One of Stelling's famous catchphrases on his Sky Sports show occurred whenever the Welsh team "Total Network Solutions" (now The New Saints FC) won a game, upon which he invariably commented, "They'll be dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions tonight", a deliberate parody of a famous mistaken comment by broadcaster Sam Leitch of the BBC when referring to a win by Raith Rovers. Stelling has now updated the catchphrase to "dancing in the streets of The New Saints" as the team has changed its name.