Non League Zac: The 14-year-old football journalist who’s making waves in non-league

During the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020, Luton Town FC received a letter from an 11-year-old fan named Zac Neal. At the time, Luton were in a difficult financial situation, and therefore Zac wrote this letter to suggest some fundraising ideas for the club, one of which included giving up all of his own saved pocket money — £63.75 to be exact.

Zac’s kind gesture brought former Luton manager Mick Harford to tears when he received the letter.

Harford said via Twitter, ‘Wow. Just received this, what an amazing gesture from Zac Neal a young LTFC fan. Brings a tear to my eye, so much appreciated by everyone at the club. #COYH’

Fast forward three years, and Zac is now an up-and-coming football journalist who has written over 360 articles in the past season, at just 14 years of age.

“It kind of started because, before COVID I was going to Luton a lot, and then COVID came and I was like ‘Oh, I’m so bored, what do I do?’,” tells Zac.

“I went to some of the pre-season games at non-league teams, and I thought, I like this we can go watch this normally as well.”

“It kind of just went from there, and now I end up going every week! My dad wasn’t too keen on it at first but now he’s grown into it!”

After visiting some local teams, Zac found a passion for non-league and decided he wanted to get involved.

Zac is now the Editorial Content Creator at Bedford Town, Editor of the Shefford Town and Campton programme, and also writes in the programme for his beloved Luton Town, but he wasn’t sure whether sports writing was the path he wanted to go down, initially.

“At the start, I didn’t really know that I was a writer, I always liked statistics and stuff like that,” said Zac.

“I met the media man at Luton in 2020 when I donated my pocket money, and that went really well.”

“He’s been really helpful because he’s got me in, doing loads of really cool stuff.”

After getting his foot in the door with Luton, Zac got in touch with local non-league teams to offer a hand with media and content creation.

“I reached out to Bedford and showed them one of my reports from their games. I said, ‘I wrote this, I don’t really know why, but here it is.’ and they said ‘Yeah that’s really good, come down again.’ and that’s really how it started off,” said Zac.

Zac is incredibly grateful for the people he has met along the course of his short career so far and appreciates the trust which they have showed.

“Dan, who I met at Bedford, he gave me the opportunity to do what I do. And everyone at Shefford as well, to have a faith in me, because you might think it’s a bit weird hiring a 14-year-old to do this,” Zac explained.

Being still only 14, Zac has to find the right balance between schoolwork and his new career, and in-depth planning is required to make sure he is able to get everything done.

“Fitting it all in’s quite tricky, because obviously, with school, we’ve got homework as well. The teachers tell you to prioritise that, and I’m like no!” Zac said with a chuckle.

“I do what I want to do first because it’s easier, then I do what I have to do after.”

“It’s just about planning. Thursday’s normally my busy day because I have to organise the Shefford programme by then, get my bit in to the Luton programme, the Bedford preview’s got to go out, and all this homework as well.”

Zac runs online blog Non League Nation, where he blogs about non-league and also writes match previews and reports, along with his official roles within local non-league clubs.

Zac has a deep passion for football, but he wants to keep his options open in terms of career prospects. He wants to keep learning and is grateful for all the exciting new experiences coming his way.

“I’ll just kind of see where it all takes me. I’ve got no massive plan,” explained Zac.

“I don’t really know where in football I want to work, I’m just happy getting as much experience as I can, going somewhere else, covering something different and learning lots of new skills.”

Bedford Town finished rock bottom of the Southern League Premier Division Central this past season, and Zac started to find it tough to cover the team getting beaten every week, but it has been a steep learning curve for Zac and he thinks it has all been worthwhile.

“You’ve got to keep going, because there was points of last season where I was struggling, just thinking, Bedford are gonna get smacked, what’s the point of writing this. Now that the season’s pretty much finished, it was well worth it.”

Zac’s now turned his attention to preparing for the next non-league season, and he’s already having to turn down offers from clubs to help out with different media teams, purely because his schedule will be too hectic.

“I’ve had different stuff at different clubs that I’ve had to say no to, for next season already, just because I’ll be too busy.”

Zac’s championing of non-league is doing wonders for highlighting the magic of lower league football, shining a light on what is the very heart of the sport in this country.