Soccer AM's fan-favourite segment was born from corridor chat – and footballers loved it

Soccer AM was a Saturday morning institution for football fans, with the show's 'Showboat' segment proving particularly popular with viewers over the years

The golden era of Saturday morning football is a thing of the past.

The sounds of Moloko's Time is Now or Kasabian's Club Foot echoing through the living room, the iconic Barclays lion heralding the start of the early fixture, and Jeff Stelling and his crew kick-starting the day in the Soccer Saturday studio at 12pm.

This was before YouTubers and vloggers took over our screens, constantly churning out endless tier lists and debating the same topics.

The crown jewel of football-related morning TV that wasn't actually football was, of course, the now discontinued but forever cherished Soccer AM.

Tim Lovejoy, Helen Chamberlain, Fenners, Jimmy Bullard, Tubes – these guys were pioneers, daredevils, banter-loving revolutionaries who loosened the metaphorical tie of football broadcasting.

They demonstrated that the beautiful game could also be a humorous one, bringing the stupid jokes you'd hear in the stands to the forefront of our screens. The show has had a lasting impact on football lingo, popularising terms like tekkers, nutmeg and top bins.

Remarkably, former host John Fendley has suggested Tim Lovejoy was instrumental in popularising another piece of football language that's now a staple in any football fan's vocabulary.

On the JLA podcast, Fendley, better known as Fenners, revealed that Lovejoy first heard the term 'showboat' while watching American sport, and started adopting the term to describe football skills, too. Eventually, they decided to use it for Soccer AM's weekly skill compilation.

Fendley admitted that finding these skills was a challenging task. "Everything then was on tape...to find skills in those days, it was hard to find because no-one was doing it."

However, everything changed when one player made his mark, the former host confessed. "Joe Cole arrived in that youth cup game (against Coventry) and starts doing rabonas, we're going, 'have you seen it?'

In an amusing twist, EFL cult hero and ex-Swansea skill maestro Lee Trundle was so eager to feature that he would text Fendley whenever he pulled off a trick worthy of the Showboat segment, even providing the timing to help the Soccer AM team locate the footage.

"'Alright Fenners Lad'," Fendley recalls the former Swansea star messaging him, "'I've done a bit of skill... it was at about 47 minutes'."

The Showboat segment was so popular that even Cristiano Ronaldo used to watch out for it during his Manchester United days, although whether he sent weekly texts is up for debate.