West Ham United is celebrating Black History Month 2025 with a series, Discovering, in which we focus on our players’ backgrounds, heritage and the unique experiences that shaped their journeys to east London.
Lifelong Hammer and award-winning Goaldiggers podcaster Philippa Jennings is our host as we speak to Callum Wilson in our third episode, shining a light on his story, culture, life and football career.
Listen to the full interview on Spotify by clicking HERE.
For Callum Wilson, born and raised in Coventry, his journey begins in the Radford suburbs, a community full of character and cultural diversity, where football offered focus, belonging and a way forward.
“There were many different cultures around Coventry,” he reflected. “A lot of poverty and things like that. You say it's rough but that was what we were used to at the end of the day and it was nice. It was a brotherhood in the area we were from. Everyone stuck together, everyone looked out for each other and like I say, there were many different cultures that did come together which was nice.
“[Football was] massive because to keep us off the streets, there were local community officers and they would come and set goals up in the park for us to have matches. They would create a little hub in the field at the back of our houses where you could do different things.
“They would put on events and things like that on the basketball court. I guess they were role models for us to try and make us do better and be better and it was probably my first experience of football.
“I was quite driven and adamant to get involved. We used to play in the garages and the cages. Like I say, after a while, I then found my own path and just took it upon myself really to go and play football. And then as you get older, different people then step into your life.”
Coventry, like many working-class cities, faces its share of social challenges, deprivation and limited opportunities. It was within those circumstances, Wilson found his drive to succeed. The same environment that could have held him back instead fuelled his hunger to flourish.
That drive motivated him to seize every opportunity. A loan spell at Kettering Town in the Conference was followed by a breakout season at his boyhood club, Coventry City, which then earned him his move to Bournemouth. Promotion to the Premier League, 89 top-flight goals, netting on his England debut, a Newcastle Player of the Season award, representing the Three Lions at the 2022 FIFA World Cup and the 2025 Carabao Cup followed, achievements that once felt worlds away from the cages and garages of Radford.
Wilson continued: “I definitely think that coming from nothing, so to speak, instils a drive within you, a work ethic to try and become a better person than what your circumstances were dictating as a kid.
“Not having a lot as a child, I felt that I wanted to be able to provide for my own children. That was always my drive, to get out of the area that I grew up in and see the world really.
“Different circumstances, different things make you take that path but I think when I look back now, parting ways with some friends and not giving them access to you as much as they would like helped me focus on my dreams and goals really. No one was able to bring me down, so I just had an inner drive.”
Wilson’s career has taken him to every corner of England, and his family along with him. First it was leaving the Midlands for the south coast in Bournemouth, before a 700-mile switch to the North East during the COVID-19 pandemic in a £20 million move to Newcastle United. His latest move to east London has brought him away from his wife Stacey and two children once more. Football has taken him far from home, but the lessons from his upbringing have never left him.
Speaking on what his childhood and life as a footballer have taught him and what he hopes to pass on to his children, he said: “To be resilient people and to be able to travel, whether that's alone, whether that's with, you know, their partners, with their own children and things like that. To go and see the world a little bit more and get out there and, you know, realise that the city that you actually grow up in is only a small part of what there is to see and you only get one life.
“So try and see as much of it as possible, really. And I guess, yeah, that's kind of what I'm working hard to be able to give them the opportunity for.
“What I would say to anyone who's young and around us, don’t let your circumstances dictate who you become.”
Find out more about our left-back El-Hadji Malick Diouf in his Discovering... episode HERE.
