Hi! I’m Jack, I’m 24 and I write/talk quite a lot! Here’s some of my latest work…
A (near-enough) weekly analysis-focused podcast on West Ham United.
Opposition analysis and player profiling for the West Ham programme.
FOOTBALL, FAMILY, WORK AND ME
I started going to watch football at about five years old when my dad used to take me to Upton Park. I can remember squeezing onto the old district line trains and the buzz of emerging from Upton Park Station onto Green Street. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with it. Next thing I was playing, watching, trading cards, talking in the playground; living and breathing football. In reality, I wasn’t all that confident at doing much else.
By the time I was 14, I’d worked out that I wasn’t going to be any good at playing so I started writing. And when I wrote my first article for West Ham Till I Die in 2014, I remember receiving a torrent of disbelieving comments– I couldn’t possibly be 14 years old, more like a 41 year-old mole for the board!
There was a brief appearance in Issue 25 of the LMA’s The Manager, thanks to Matt, for an interview with Harvey Biljon.
And then came The Blizzard. Here I pretty much started out in the stock cupboard, packing copies and taking them down to the post office as an 18-year-old intern before becoming the social media admin and going on to travel around the UK and Ireland to produce live editions of The Blizzard Podcast. Then, I became the voice of said podcast temporarily –
Here’s me reading Simone Pierotti’s wonderful piece on Zanzibari football:
…Before devising, producing and editing the well-loved Greatest Games Podcast.
In 2020 things took a turn for the dramatic at home and when both my parents fell ill I had to step back from everything to be with them for the what limited time we would have together. And when the pandemic struck and we found ourselves locked indoors, I produced my first proper series of poems, Memories For The Future (which I now feel a bit self conscious about).
Unfortunately, Dad died before West Ham qualified for the Europa League at the end of the 20/21 season meaning we never got to enjoy a European fixture together but this only sharpened my focus on enjoying these moments while they last so when Knees Up Mother Brown offered me the chance to run a brand new analytical West Ham podcast and a platform for all of my West Ham written work, it was an offer I couldn’t turn down.
That was when I started working with the wonderful Callum Goodall and we launched Analytics United together to decode some of the frustratingly impenetrable terminology associated with 2020s football for West Ham fans. We started our own podcast, The West Ham Breakdown, and then took a huge step forward in beginning to work directly with West Ham United (web, programme, socials) on signing announcements, opposition analysis, and player profiling.
I can’t believe this is what I get to do.
Jack Elderton 