A Dane, a football,
and a very long run.

Jan Schrøder La Caille grew up in Denmark absolutely convinced he was going to be a professional footballer.

He was not going to be a professional footballer.

Knee problems — as millions of people across the world will solemnly nod along to. The dream ended. Life continued. The love of the game did not.

Growing up in Denmark, English football was everywhere. Most Danes who care about football have their English club — the one they chose somewhere between the ages of eight and twelve and have never quite been able to explain rationally since. Jan is no different. Which club? For now, you can guess. The atmosphere at British grounds got under his skin at a young age and never quite left.

That feeling is, ultimately, what Chantlings is about.

Football and running eventually found each other in a very specific way. Unable to play at the level he'd once imagined, Jan combined his two great passions in the most logical way available to him — by dribbling a football for 26.2 miles.

Guinness World Record attempt, Sydkyst Marathon, Denmark, 2013.

The record has since been broken. He is dealing with this.

It is worth noting that the record attempt was partly inspired by his son, who at the time wanted to grow up to be the fastest dribbler in the world. The apple, as they say, does not fall far from the tree — even if the tree occasionally loses the ball on snowy terrain.

Earlier, we didn't reveal which English club Jan chose to support. Did you guess it? Here it is: Blackburn Rovers.

There are persistent rumours that he is a member of Denmark's smallest official supporters' club for an English team. He has never denied this.

The choice made a certain amount of sense at the time — Blackburn, with a startling disregard for the natural order of things, won the league in 1994–95, not long after Jan had picked them. For a boy who had just chosen a club, this looked less like luck and more like excellent judgement. His brother, guided by similarly mysterious instincts, picked Leicester City — and got to watch them repeat the trick, twenty-one years later.

Mid-table finishes. Relegation battles. Matches nobody outside the family was watching. It maps almost perfectly onto their real, weekly footballing life — AaB, Jan's actual Danish club, the one whose shirt he wore to break a Guinness World Record. Between the two clubs, he's had plenty of practice in the long kind of loving a football club. Not the trophy. The showing up.

The connection to FC United of Manchester is a personal one. Jan's partner Fiona and her father were among the volunteers from the early days of the club — showing up, selling programmes, doing the unglamorous work that keeps a fan-owned club alive when it is playing in borrowed grounds in front of small crowds. Their name is on a brick at Broadhurst Park.

Jan has sold programmes there himself on a few occasions. This makes him, by his own reckoning, a minor but genuine part of the FC United story — and gave him a close-up view of what it looks like when supporters build something from nothing because they believe it is right.

That belief — stubborn, irrational, and entirely worth having — is woven into every Chantlings story.

Chantlings grew from all of this. From years of watching football and feeling that the most important thing happening was never on the pitch — it was in the stands. In the songs. In the decision of thousands of ordinary people to show up and sing, week after week, regardless of the score.

The stories are an attempt to put that feeling into words. For the child hearing the songs for the first time. For the parent trying to explain why this particular club, this particular ground, these particular songs matter. For the grandparent who has been singing them for forty years and still can't quite explain why — but knows, with absolute certainty, that they do.

Jan is also at work on children's books in Danish. More on that when the time is right.