Transfer of the season: How new Soccer Saturday host Simon Thomas scored one of the biggest TV gigs in football

Alex Ferguson. Magnus Magnusson. Logan Roy. Succession comes with daunting expectations when there is an extraordinarily hard act to follow. Filling the Gillette Soccer Saturday hot seat occupied by Jolly Jeff Stelling for 25 years is about as tough as it gets when it comes to presenting live sport. He became synonymous with a whole style of hosting live sports television and the show even generated popular catchphrases such as “Unbelievable, Jeff,” and “I don’t know what happened, Jeff.”

So, kudos to Sky Sports for appointing Simon Thomas as the anchor of their strangely compulsive football results and chitchat show. By emphasising what “an honour” it was to replace the “legend” Stelling, Thomas made all the right noises before last weekend’s Championship dress rehearsal for the opening Premier League drama this weekend.

Thomas is a good appointment. He’s modest, knowledgeable and has battled his way through some horrendous things in life, challenges far more exacting than trying to draw some decent conversation out of a tedious old football lag.

The first word on Thomas’s Twitter biography is “Christian”, a proud declaration from a man who says that “God was an ever-present in family life as I was growing up”. He was born on 26 January 1973 in Cromer, Norfolk, where his father Andrew was an Anglican curate. After his family moved to Surrey, he was educated at St John’s School in Leatherhead, before doing a history degree at Birmingham University. Even as a lifelong Norwich City fan, he retains a belief that “God is actually for real”.

His faith was tested to the limit in 2017 when his 40-year-old wife Gemma died within four days of receiving an acute myeloid leukaemia diagnosis. “Life cartwheeled out of control,” said the man who had to break the traumatic news to his shellshocked eight-year-old son, Ethan. “Life was incredibly tough, I went to some of the darkest places I’ve ever been,” the presenter admitted in an interview with ITV News Anglia earlier this year. He drank in secret, sometimes a bottle of vodka every night, yet somehow managed to help his grieving son through this tragic event. In May 2019, he published a memoir called Love, Interrupted: Navigating Grief One Day at a Time, which is a moving account of pain and vulnerability.

Thomas is not the first God-fearing sports broadcaster, incidentally. Leaving aside former goalkeeper and Grandstand presenter David Icke (and his oddball “Son of the Godhead” claims), there was also former Football Focus host Dan Walker, who benched himself from any possible future “Super Sunday” broadcasting after telling Loose Women in 2022 that his faith meant he couldn’t work on that special day.

Thomas is active on Instagram and revealed last week that he will use prayer before each Soccer Saturday edition to get himself right “mentally and spiritually” for the show. He also said that during broadcasts he will munch on Bassetts Jelly Babies “to keep up the energy”. The 50-year-old confessed to being “nervous” about his new role, and afterwards spoke of a “steep learning curve”, especially because “one or two things didn’t work in the new studio”. To his credit, Thomas remained calm during occasionally shambolic proceedings and technical glitches.

The glitzy new studio has similarities to the one that cable rival BT used for its discarded (inferior) Saturday afternoon BT Sport Score show – surely Sky didn’t get it on eBay for a knockdown price? – with Ben Wickham, director of creative output at Sky Sports, trumpeting a “brand refresh” following Stelling’s departure. Yet all the added gizmos, including overhead cameras with wide-angle lenses, new high-resolution LED screens and an upgraded main video wall, ultimately won’t make a jot of difference unless the chemistry is right between Thomas and his talking heads on the studio floor.

The panellists alongside Thomas on last weekend’s debut – Paul Merson, Clinton Morrison, Neil Lennon, Sue Smith and Matt Dawson – were perched in individual pods (replacing the old long single desk), part of a strategy, in Wickham’s words, towards “a more open and relaxed” format. Sadly, for Thomas, the pod people were – to put it politely – a bit dry on such a rainy August day. For the 2023-2024 season shows to sparkle, new ringmaster Thomas will need some quality repartee. He made the right noises about being “in safe hands”, but his struggle was cruelly mocked by a tweet that observed: “Really feel sorry for Simon Thomas having to deal with this bunch of boring sods.”

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I met Merson many moons ago, when he was an Arsenal player, and very affable he was, too. I recall him joking about his “addiction” to crisps (he said he sometimes ate more than 10 bags a day), a craving that got him in trouble with Stelling, who once apologised on air for the loud crunching sound made by Merson chomping on a bag of sweet chilli snacks. Merson has been a pundit since 2006 and I guess you can’t blame him for milking such a lucrative, comfortable gig. Morrison (pod two) can be funny, and Dawson and Smith are good eggs, but they will all need to be more entertaining to help the show step up a gear. You just can’t escape the fact that a football show with no football action relies on clever, insightful, amusing and articulate conversation.

An easy win for Thomas would be to entice new referee analyst Mike Dean to show some of the light-hearted personality he displayed on football road trip show The Overlap on Tour with Gary Neville, Roy Keane and Jamie Carragher. Sky needs Dean to be more than just the usual nodding dog ex-official uttering banal platitudes about controversial refereeing decisions.

Stelling was a master of one-liners (and self-deprecating jokes about his beloved Hartlepool United) and during a quarter of a century, he had great rapport with superstars such as George Best. The show had other excellent pundits over Stelling’s long residency – including Sean Dyche, Ally McCoist and the King of Calamity Chris Kamara – but it relied heavily on old-school banter and idiosyncrasy. I certainly don’t pine for leaden pundits such as professional scouser Phil Thompson or Alan “Mogadon” Mullery, and there’s only limited amusement in hearing Robbie Fowler’s painful attempts at pronouncing Per Mertesacker.

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What will undoubtedly help Thomas is his experience in top-level broadcasting. He has taken on high-profile roles before, especially in 1999, when he became a Blue Peter presenter after Richard Bacon was sacked for snorting cocaine. In his time on the iconic children’s show, Thomas was a natural, just as at ease with young guests as he was with the Queen, to whom he memorably handed a Blue Peter Gold Badge and joked about it giving her access to the Tower of London. He also excelled at a range of daredevil stunts, including more than 40 solo skydives with the Royal Air Force.

Also crucial is his deep-rooted knowledge of the game. The speed of football facts coming at you as the host of Soccer Saturday seems terrifyingly intense, but Thomas can handle it. He knows his stuff. After leaving Blue Peter in 2005, he was a presenter on Sky Sports News, before becoming the channel’s lead Football League host in 2011. His sports career was only halted when he quit to look after his son, following his wife’s death. He gradually returned, doing “bits and bobs” for Amazon Prime Video over the past three seasons, and looked relaxed and competent in that freelance role.

“Quite simply, there is nothing that compares to presenting live sport,” Thomas has previously said. He shared a fun moment with Hollywood stars and Wrexham AFC co-owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney last weekend. “Good luck on your first day, Simon, I hear you are a Norwich fan,” said Deadpool actor Reynolds. “I brought Hugh Jackman today, who always likes Norwich, so you have company. We’ll be happy to fight it out later, though.” The camera panned back to Thomas, who quipped: “My work is done. My work is done. Couldn’t get any better, hey. Apparently, Rob McElhenney said something but we couldn’t broadcast it. No. It was a little bit naughty.”

Another positive side to the personnel change is that Thomas is a mental health advocate working in a high-exposure role. He previously talked about the “crippling anxiety”, panic attacks and debilitating work-based stress involved in appearing on television and is an advocate of emotional honesty. In January 2023, he spoke at a mental health awareness event at Norwich City. “Men are bad at opening up,” he told the audience at Carrow Road. “We see vulnerability in our society as a sign of weakness. We have to change the narrative. We have to tell men that opening up, being vulnerable, is not a sign of weakness. It’s actually a sign of strength.”

Hopefully, these are better times all round for Thomas. In July 2021, he married Derrina Jebb, a church minister’s daughter, and 15 months later she gave birth to Talitha. His baby daughter came through a premature birth and Thomas posted a touching message expressing his gratitude to Stoke Mandeville Hospital’s neonatal team and the NHS.

There’s no doubt Thomas will struggle to win round all the diehard Stelling fans, and he can expect some crass criticism on Twitter. But given his previous remark that “life’s too short to get too worried about social media”, he will probably take the online hecklers in his stride. I’m also sure that Stelling will turn up on another sports platform, along with sidekick Kamara, and be his usual brilliant self. Thomas, I expect, will put what he calls “his own stamp” on the pivotal Soccer Saturday role – but a few more captivating apostles in the pods will help spread the word a bit faster.