One on One | From non-league to the World Cup, with Callum Wilson!
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What was Callum Wilson's journey from grassroots football to the Premier League?
Do you remember the first time you were on Match of the Day? Yeah, of course. I think I still have it on the box somewhere. Of course, it's nice to see in the Premier League players coming from, you know, international, overseas and things like that. But it's also nice to see stories similar to myself, similar to Semenya, where you've had to graft. You go from a boy from Coventry playing Wolf with Robbie Williams, it's like, what the hell? I'm sitting here because hard work has got me here. Yeah, just living a childhood dream, I guess.
Hello and welcome back to One on One, the podcast where the Premier League's biggest names come in for a chat. I'm Joe Tomlinson and remember on the last podcast I said I wouldn't speak to you again for a couple of weeks unless we had some news. Well, we have some news because on the last day of 2025, I went to see Callum Wilson at the West Ham United training ground and we had an absolutely delightful chat. But as Sky Sports News reported, it seems that Callum won't be hanging around at the Hammers for very long as the club look towards their fight to stay in the Premier League. Wilson only joined West Ham from Newcastle in the summer. Before the Magpies, he made a name for himself, banging them in for Bournemouth when he won the championship and worked under the brilliant Eddie Howe.
Working backwards through his football timeline, Bournemouth had picked the striker up from his hometown club of Coventry City, which included a couple of non-league loans. But it was Callum's early career that I wanted to talk to him about most, because unlike a lot of professional footballers these days, he was actually playing grassroots football until his late teens. So this is a proper, proper footballing journey, from Sunday League to League One, on to the Championship and the Premier League, and even a World Cup with England. Truly fairytale stuff. So as he seemingly prepares to embark on the next phase of his remarkable career, and with one eye still on another World Cup this summer, this is my one-on-one with Callum Wilson.
Callum Wilson!
Brilliant!
It's a cracker from Callum Wilson.
Cal, thank you very much for joining me today. I really want to touch on your career because it's really interesting, the grassroots journey to where you are today. Not every player in the Premier League has a journey like yours. So let's touch on your youth career to start with, because it was different to many players, wasn't it? There was a lot of grassroots in there.
It was. I was in grassroots until 15 years old. And then that's when I decided I was almost leaving school and I needed to actually pull my finger out, so to speak. So I had to get into an academy of some sort. I went on trial at West Brom. They said no. I went on trial at Nottingham Forest. They said no. They didn't say no. They said, you know, we've got a striker already and we don't really see that you're better than them, so we're just going to stick with what we've got. And then I had a trial game for Coventry where I scored a hat-trick and then the rest is history.
What is it like when you're that age and clubs are saying no to you? Because it happens a lot. Loads of footballers experience it. But then to drop out of the system as well and go grassroots Sunday league for a little bit, that's very different.
No, it is. And I think it's about your mentality in that instance and how you deal with the setback. You can either use that as fuel and think, right, OK, my next move, I'm going to improve and show them all my qualities and what I can bring. Or you can go the other way and fold. And I think for me, that was never an option. So it was about making it of some sort and not giving up.
So you were playing Sunday League at that time as well, weren't you, a little bit? Yeah, yeah. What was that like, that experience for you? Because you must have been banging them in, though. You must have been scoring so many goals.
I was getting a few. I think I ended up probably about 60 goals in the season, which is, you know, Messi standards, that sort of stuff.
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