Zinedine Zidane, Kylian Mbappé, Gareth Bale and current Ballon d’Or winner Ousmane Dembélé; those are just some of the global football superstars that YouTube star John Nellis has brushed shoulders with.
It’s been quite a journey from the streets of Mourne View Crescent and Marguerite, where John grew up alongside sister Fiona and parents Tony and Emma. The Newcastle man’s rise has been remarkable. Having started his YouTube career in the summer of 2022 after quitting his job as an air traffic controller at Cork Airport, his channel has grown from just over 7,000 subscribers to over 11 million.
His week now consists of jetting across the globe to film videos with the biggest names in football, a far cry from his early days in Newcastle. John, while still a student at Shimna Integrated College, was given his first job by former Royal County Down greenkeeper Alan Strachan, raking bunkers on the Annesley Links.
After leaving school, he went on to work, as he describes it, “just about every job in Newcastle” – as a kitchen porter, behind the bar at The Harbour Inn, serving ice cream at Morelli’s, making pizzas at Pizza Palazzo, as a science technician at Shimna College, and as a social worker at Autism Initiatives.
In 2014, the former Tollymore United and Bryansford youth player was convinced to move into air traffic control by his cousin, Gerard. He took a job at Cork Airport, where he worked for eight years.
His first tentative steps into the world of YouTube began in 2019, as his love for fantasy football led him to start a podcast.
“I started a fantasy football podcast in 2019, just before Covid, so I was able to build up a community of a few thousand people through that. I started uploading the podcasts in video form to YouTube, then, from there, I decided to try and make more bespoke YouTube videos. The videos at the start were terrible, but that’s what everybody is like at the start,” John explained.
One of John’s podcast guests was Alex Emery, who at the time worked for Sky Sports. The pair struck up a friendship and in 2022 they both made the decision to quit their jobs and start their own YouTube channel.
Although he admits he was happy in his air traffic control job, he couldn’t resist the temptation of pursuing his dream.
“I really enjoyed that job, and I never thought content creation would become a thing for me, but it did. I just went all in and started learning content inside out.”
Starting out with just 7,431 subscribers in 2022, the John Nellis channel has become one of the fastest growing football YouTube channels in the world. Having started out with no prior experience of filming or editing videos, the level of growth in such a short period of time is staggering and came as a surprise to the man himself. John admitted he was initially happy to reach 100,000 subscribers.
“Whenever I got my 100,000 subscriber plaque at the end of 2022, we got a photoshoot arranged because we were so happy with that. I thought that was the pinnacle. In June of last year, we hit one million subscribers. There was a time when I never dreamed of having one million, but once we got to 500-600,000, I knew one million would happen, it was just a matter of time and consistency. At the one million subscriber party, I said that I didn’t think one million (subscribers) would happen so soon, Alex was a bit bolder than that – he said, ‘We’ll see everybody at the 10 million (subscribers) party.’”
“In September, we held a 10 million subscriber party – so it basically took us one year to go from one million to ten million, and now we’re on 11 million.”
In the full article John talks about how he grew his audience, the challenges of doing so, and why he wants to get Newcastle into more of his videos.
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