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In the beginning there was Hamilton Fyfe, newspaper editor, playwright and twice-failed candidate for Parliament. In 1926 he travelled to the United States to write a Radio Times article titled “The Way They Live in America”. It included an account of a radio broadcast of American football with “a continuous description of the play”.
The following year the BBC attempted rugby in the same style. Football arrived on the airwaves a week later, Arsenal vs Sheffield United on January 22, 1927. It was announced in that day’s Telegraph, but only after a screed beginning: “One so often hears stories of radio listeners who, disgusted at the poor quality of the British Broadcasting Corporation programmes, prefer foreign programmes.”
On the day of the game at Highbury, Teddy Wakelam, a former rugby player for Harlequins, climbed into a small wooden hut behind the goal to give the first ever football commentary.
Earlier this year, nearly a century later, Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Savage celebrated a Manchester United goal with deafening exuberance on the gantry, filmed by cameras hoping to capture a viral moment. How did we get here?
Listeners to the Arsenal vs Sheffield United game in 1927 were grappling with an unfamiliar form of broadcasting. They were helped by a diagram printed in the Radio Times which divided the pitch into eight squares. The few archive recordings which survive from these days have commentary punctuated by stiff interjections from a colleague as the ball moves between sections: “number two! number four!”. The person in the square-calling role became known as Dr Watson, although etymologists believe the phrase “back to square one”, commonly attributed this era, is more likely derived from snakes and ladders.
The Radio Times supplied this grid with the pitch divided into numbered sections so listeners would know where the action was during the first BBC radio football commentary - Radio Times/BBC
The Times called commentator Wakelam’s work “notably vivid and impressive” and The Spectator said “that type of broadcasting has come to stay”. Two days later the Telegraph review suggested football had been more successful than rugby on the radio, with praise for the improved acoustics in Wakelam’s portable commentary shed which had reduced distracting crowd noise.
Our wireless correspondent reported from the control room at Highbury: “I was able to compare the relative merits of watching and listening. In view of the dismal conditions outside, the bad visibility and the depressing prevalence of mud and snow, I should have preferred the radio, but real soccer enthusiasts will doubtless disagree.” Later in the same article, to give some idea of the wider radio climate, there are details of a forthcoming debate about “The Menace of the Leisured Woman”.
How The Daily Telegraph reported the first sports commentary in 1927
Some clubs were less keen on commentary. Nottingham Forest’s chairman H.R. Cobbin refused a BBC request to cover their game against Preston in February 1927, saying “There is no benefit to football clubs for their matches to be broadcast. It is obvious that in wet weather the club would suffer very considerably financially.”
But a year later commentary was established enough for the BBC yearbook to identify a theme which persists: “The perfect commentator… does not exist. There are, indeed, commentators who can please all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but there never has been found, and there never will be, the man who will please all the people all the time.” Or, as Barry Davies was fond of saying, “One man’s commentator is another man’s pain in the a---.”
Nearly a decade after its first radio commentary the BBC began broadcasting football on television, a specially arranged fixture between Arsenal and Arsenal reserves on September 16, 1937. Thomas Woodrooffe was on duty for the following year’s Cup final, between Huddersfield and Preston. A former naval officer, Woodrooffe spoke in clipped and proper tones, pronouncing “off” as “orf”. He is also responsible for the first recorded example of the commentator’s curse.
We join him with two minutes left in extra time: “Another goal kick for Huddersfield, and I’ll eat my hat if there’s any score before this whistle goes [for full time].” Shortly afterwards Preston won a penalty, which George Mutch scored. Woodrooffe appeared on the TV programme Picture Page a week later to eat a hat-shaped cake.
After a pause in football during the Second World War, the years that followed brought floodlights, the European Cup and Raymond Glendenning, who commentated on every FA Cup final from 1946 to 1963 for the BBC, resplendent in horn-rimmed glasses and handlebar moustache. “My father-in-law used to go and watch football at Roker Park and would tell me that when Glendenning would turn up he was revered as a real star,” says John Murray, the BBC’s current football correspondent.
There was some live coverage of the 1954 and 1958 World Cups on TV, but games from Chile in 1962 were shown days later. Match of the Day made its debut in 1964, two years before the big bang of modern football commentary.
By the World Cup of 1966 the BBC’s radio coverage of football had turned up the crowd noise. The basic sound and rhythm of modern radio commentary are in place. When Roger Hunt scored for England in their final group game against France, Brian Moore lets the crowd cheer before interjecting.
There is some tactical awareness, France’s formation is remarked upon but called “their 4-3-3 situation”. There are plenty of pauses too, gaps in which you would now be hearing from a pundit. Moore was punchy enough to go without in his summary: “The time is coming when you’re running out of excuses for England. I’ve believed all along that they stand a tremendous chance of winning this World Cup, but for the first time tonight I have my doubts now, because England, as I say, really didn’t look the part.” Fortunately those doubts were misplaced.
A fourth goal in a triumphant World Cup final would always have been remembered, but Kenneth Wolstenholme’s words elevated Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick for eternity. Securing a signature line like Wolstenholme’s has become a rite of passage for top-level commentators. But writing for The Telegraph in 1991 he chastised himself: “What else could I say as Hurst shot? Maybe there was a hint of happiness and triumph in the words, unforgivable for a commentator who had to be impartial”.
Bryon Butler became the BBC football correspondent from 1968, leading the radio effort. The Big Match arrived on the newly regionalised ITV in the same year as challenger to MotD. A year later Mary Raine became the first woman to report on a football match, on Sports Report in 1969. Reaction to her work was largely positive, although there was some condescension from Michael Carey in The Observer: “I do hope one of her colleagues will put her right, that all Sunderland need to do is give the ball to someone who can give it a mighty wallop from 30 yards. It is in the penalty area it counts, my dear.”
Mary Raine’s landmark broadcast was big news
The idea of the “breathless” commentator could have been invented for Butler. In between sentences you could hear his inhalations, like the vocals of Matt Bellamy on the first two Muse albums. Passages of play in his Chelsea vs Leeds FA Cup final of 1970 become staccato surnames, with some attempts of self-aware poetry in slower moments. Eddie Gray is “one of the Leeds players with bewildering ball control, so dextrous with the feet, if that’s not a paradox in saying that”. Butler sounds as if he might cry when Leeds make it 2-1.
By now football’s audience were familiar with a growing cast of commentators. “David Coleman was incredible,” says Murray. “He’s so ahead of his time, he is so forthright.” On TV there was the rise of a nerdier sort with John Motson. “His fruity, lilting, faintly swottish tones are borrowed when schoolboys smash in volleys on the playground and by punters in pubs, emitting squeals of delight at a goal going in on TV. We are all John Motson sometimes,” wrote Paul Hayward on these pages in1995.
“Motty was remarkably assiduous in what he did,” says Jon Champion, who joined the BBC in the late 1980s. “John and Barry Davies were a great contrast.” Both prepared thoroughly but “Motty could tell you the inside leg measurement of the Crystal Palace right-back, whereas Barry was much more about being taken by the moment and expressing the emotion that swept over him.”
By the 1970s Motson and his peers had to make some room in the commentary box. “A lovely story which Motty told me about co-commentary was somebody had this idea that Jimmy Hill would join David Coleman,” says Clive Tyldesley. “Coleman was against it, but apparently the compromise was he agreed to have Hill alongside him, as long as there was only one microphone.”
David Coleman was initially resistant to having Jimmy Hill (pictured) alongside him in the commentary box - BBC
Around this time some viewers were pining for the quieter style of the previous decades. In a 1977 Telegraph article headlined “Are they learning to keep quiet?” TV critic Sean Day-Lewis recounted: “I was much gratified the other day to meet Bill Ward, the highly mobile chairman of the ITV Sport Committee and hear him say that ‘commentators talk too much’.
“Where is the fault worst, I wondered? ‘Football’, he suggested. We did not progress much beyond this. Nobody is going to tell Brian Moore that he talks too much, not even in the cool of evening much less in the heat of a game.”
Nevertheless Day-Lewis predicted a better future: “I forecast that there will be a genuine move towards fewer abhorrent effusions.”
At least British audiences were on familiar stylistic ground with their commentators. In a 1986 letter from the Mexico World Cup Michael Calvin was aghast about the standard of American coverage. “An English viewer weaned on the intelligent analysis of commentators like John Motson and Martin Tyler would scarcely believe the banality of the presentation. They scream ‘bingo’ when a goal is scored and litter commentaries with incomprehensible phrases like ‘a great foot trap’ or ‘an on-path into the penalty zone’.”
After the 1990 World Cup provoked a wave of popularity which football still surfs, commentary began to change at speed. Most significant was the entry of Sky to UK television sports broadcasting. Expert pundits alongside commentators became the default, most notably with the pairing of Andy Gray and Tyler.
“We were in the right place at the right time,” says Tyler. “We felt like we were pioneers. The commentary was me and Ian Darke, and as soon as the incident happened Andy did the replay. The first replay, not the fifth.
“It’s a team game. The thing about going from ITV to Sky was that everyone working in the Sky team was football mad. At ITV you’d get cameramen who were mainly working on Coronation Street. I remember once when I was working someone said ‘which one is Dalglish?’”
As late as the mid 1980s ITV and BBC were still showing only a handful of live Division One matches per season, which led to a certain discipline. “Because it was highlights you had to be fairly clipped,” says Tyler. “You had to stop talking before the slow-motion replay finished, then they could cut the picture and the sound together.”
Gray and his producers grasped that the modern pundit, or co-commentator as they became known, had to offer more than platitudes. This raised standards but led to some overreach. “Like Brazil’s Roberto Carlos, [Ron] Atkinson likes to come forward at every opportunity,” wrote Giles Smith for The Telegraph in 1998. “Reversing the traditional commentator/analyst relationship, Ron speaks whenever, and for however long, he likes and the commentator jumps in only when there is a gap. He has blurred the boundaries between attack and defence like no other analyst before him.”
On radio there was the launch of Radio 5 in 1990, reimagined as 5Live in 1994, switching focus from more eclectic speech programming to rolling news, topical talk and live sport. The tone became more casual, with a larger variety of accents and approaches. Belfast-born Alan Green became a key voice, often recalcitrant and unafraid to tell his listeners just how terrible a game was. He was an antidote to some of the accommodating cheerleading for the Premier League from other broadcasters.
Few were as noisy as Jonathan Pearce, lead commentator and sports editor of Capital Gold from the late 1980s, although his enthusiasm came from a purist’s enjoyment of the game. “His style was so radically different from what was going on on BBC Radio at the time,” says Murray. “I always felt he was commentating like it was in Roy of the Rovers, a comic-book style.” His coverage of Eric Cantona’s kick on a Crystal Palace fan in 1995 was a fair representation.
Capital Gold commentary
Pearce had taken some inspiration from overseas. “It was unbelievable hearing those snippets of Brazilian commentary and I wanted to mirror the excitement of the fans,” he says. These days his style is more toned-down, and better-suited to TV but you can hear echoes of the exuberant Pearce radio style across great swathes of modern commentary. “If that’s true I’d be very proud to have played that part,” he says. “I do hear Capital Gold-isms in some of the commentators now”.
The overall trend in football since the 90s is seemingly limitless growth. There are now more commentators than ever, to cover more broadcast football than seemed imaginable 30 years ago. How do today’s commentators assess the current state of their profession?
Everyone contacted for this article expressed some level of hesitation for one modern commentary trend.“It fills me with horror, I can understand why people do it but it’s absolutely not for me,” says Jacqui Oatley. “I can’t think of anything worse than being filmed while I’m commentating.”
“Never, never, never, ever, ever, never,” says Pearce. “I just think it’s an absolute ego fest. It’s about the event, it’s not about you, the commentary should never be about you.”
The desk-mounted gantry cam is the defining object of the current commentary landscape. We see our heroes hard at work, engaged in the action but due to the presence of the camera inevitably behaving performatively to some degree. It is perfect for social media, where match rights are restricted and unaccompanied audio rarely thrives as a viral property. Murray is about the most optimistic voice on the subject: “It does demonstrate and spread the word about what we do, so therefore it’s good for business, but that’s not how radio is supposed to be. I am positive about it because people see it and people are nice about it.”
Coleman’s old battle for control over one microphone has been lost, now commentators feel almost secondary to the people alongside them. In fact some of the defining lines of the recent Premier League: “Mo Salah, you little dancer” or “Where do you want your statue, Vincent Kompany?” have come from the co-commentary position.
Sometimes the commentator feels almost forgotten. “One thing about the way it is now which is both beneficial and tough for commentators is there’s so much going on with the studio guests that your commentary isn’t listened to word for word,” says Tyler. “There’s some very good producers out there but they’ve got so much on their plate.”
Perhaps the increasing workload for commentators is to blame for this change in focus. It is common for today’s top voices to work four matches in a week. Writing in 1992 for The Telegraph, Motson proudly stated he had “covered 40 matches for the BBC last season – a comfortable average of almost one a week”.
Some say they prefer to stay as engaged as possible by commentating at least every other day. “I find it easier when I’m working all the time, because I feel like I’m across the overarching narratives,” says ITV’s lead commentator Sam Matterface. That work is increasingly tiring.
“The game changes, we’ve just gone through a period where the ball basically doesn’t go out of play,” he says. “You don’t get as many replays, so you don’t get that breathing space and it’s constant action. Even when Manchester City have got the ball on the halfway line, one line-breaking pass, you’ve got to be in there. You can’t switch off. That probably precipitates more talking, because you’ve always got to be ready for the next moment.”
The word count might be up and so is the cast list. Some nostalgic viewers yearn for the lost days of definitive voices for each sport. “To build up a relationship with millions of people that you will never meet, and for them to develop an affection for you and a trust of you is broadcasting magic,” says Tyldesley. He does not foresee a return. “That box in the corner of that room used to be the family’s box, now there are 15 screens in the house. Mass communal viewing, the 28 million that I commentated to for a World Cup semi-final, you don’t get those opportunities any more.”
Oatley became the first female commentator on MotD, taking Fulham vs Blackburn in 2007. “I thought I’d be able to sneak onto the gantry at Craven Cottage but I was naive to think that because unfortunately it leaked to a national paper on the Tuesday before the Saturday. I was just extremely grateful to get through it and onto the next one because after that it was never a big deal again.”
Jacqui Oatley makes broadcasting history at Craven Cottage in 2007 - Getty Images/Julian Finney
She encountered double standards. Some accused her of lacking the necessary playing experience to cover football, but Oatley only turned to broadcasting because her football career was curtailed by a serious knee injury. “I remember going to my second MotD commentary and seeing a male colleague in the pressroom who said ‘the weirdest thing about all that was that you were getting stick for not having played’. He said, ‘I’ve never played, and no one’s ever asked whether I have’.”
The race and gender of lead commentators in men’s football is fairly uniform, but the incumbents approach their job in different styles. Darren Fletcher on TNT Sport is unpretentious, straddling the world of players and fans. Guy Mowbray, the BBC TV lead commentator is a master of economy. Matterface, his ITV equivalent, is fond of a quip. Murray, BBC Sport’s football correspondent, and primary voice of 5Live commentary is transparently influenced by his love of cricket and Test Match Special.
Sky Sports replaced Tyler with the poetic stylings of Peter Drury, a man who marked Cristiano Ronaldo’s return to Manchester United as follows: “Wreathed in red. Restored to this great gallery of the game. A walking work of art. Vintage, beyond valuation, beyond forgery or imitation, 18 years since that trembling teenager of touch and tease first tiptoed onto this storied stage stage. Now in his immaculate maturity, CR7, reunited”.
A broadcaster’s overall tone is defined by its choice of commentator. “When you’re launching a new venture, the brand is important,” says Andrew Hornett, Prime Video’s director of live sports. He led Amazon into the football broadcasting world after similar previous work for Setanta and ESPN. “The selection of commentator is one of the most important decisions you can make,” says Hornett. “The kind of things that we’re looking for are credibility, authority, reputation, eloquence, use of language, deep knowledge of the sport, experience, charisma, sense of humour.
“For Amazon, joy is important, it’s important to enjoy it. If we’re looking at talent, we might even put numbers to each of those categories and analyse them.”
The biggest change in the career of most active commentators has been the free availability of information online. A well-thumbed Rothmans annual was once the commentator’s best friend. Now each has numerous websites and video platforms to help them prepare.
“My first game was Wakefield against Worksop Town in the Unibond Premier League in 2003, when lower and non-league player information was almost non-existent online,” says Oatley. “There were no YouTube clips or anything like that. My main recollection is of the really low commentary position in the corner, the players were miles away, and they all looked the same.”
Sometimes it feels as if the viewer is bombarded with stats regardless of their usefulness. “I don’t like stats for the sake of stats, I want my stats to tell a story,” says Oatley. “You might see a goalkeeper has made 10 saves in a match, but nine of them were pea-rollers, they don’t count as saves in real life I don’t think.”
“I hate the amount of statistical information which is now arbitrarily projected onto the screen at a time when it’s totally irrelevant to what we’ve just seen,” says Tyldesley. “I feel that anything that appears on the screen I should relate to as a commentator, because the visual is more important than the audio.”
Intense preparation for games is a non-negotiable, almost a fetishised aspect of the job. Tyldesley produces A3 sheets with top-of-the-class handwriting for every match, and sells reproductions of his notes for famous games online. “When people see my commentary charts they say ‘you’ll need all that in case the game gets quiet’,” he says. “No, that’s not what it’s for. And it’s not a safety net either, it’s a comfort blanket. I would say as a rough estimate if I use more than 10 per cent I’d probably start to bore people.
“My feeling about research is that it’s incumbent on the lead commentator to know more about the backdrop to the game than anybody watching. The skill isn’t doing the research, it’s how, if and when you use it.”
Most commentators have been accused of pre-preparing lines. Most will freely admit that they think in detail about a forthcoming game and how it will pan out. Few will cop to writing bon mots in advance. “You might write something down and think ‘oh I might use that’, then you do and it’ll sound naff,” says Matterface. “Some of the best lines come to you in a blind panic.”
Pearce remembers trying to recapture an off-the-cuff moment: “I did a line saying ‘Tony Adams bears the brunt of the donkey chants from away fans but eeyore, eeyore ee-yalways gets it right for Arsenal’ that went down well and was spontaneous.
“Then about six months later I did pre-prepare a line and it came out disastrously. Nowadays I hear that quite a lot in other commentators. I can tell and I’m sure the listeners and viewers can too because it’s clunky, like changing from fifth down to first. It goes from being ad-libbed to a script they’ve written down.”
Knowing how and when to deploy your research and how to improvise only comes from experience. This is often compared to flying, pilots needing to log a certain number of air miles to become trustworthy. “You can go on courses on how to be a commentator,” says Champion. “They’ll give you all the technical advice in the world, but they don’t tell you what to do if something goes wrong, or if something comes out of your mouth that shouldn’t have and how you get out of that nasty corner. For that reason, you’ve just got to get out there and do it.”
Those who thrive tend to be self-critical. But there is now another critical audience to contend with. “I try not to tweet too much before a game that I’m doing because then you’re almost inciting, you’re putting your hand up like a beacon ‘if you don’t like my commentary here’s where to come to slag it off’,” says Oatley.
“I always say that it’s a more perilous job than high-wire trapeze or brain surgery, because most people in the country accept that they can’t do those,” says Tyldesley. “But everybody thinks they can be a commentator. The worst brain surgeon in the world doesn’t get any criticism, because people don’t want to do that.
“You get people sniping, the memes of people hanging themselves and jumping off high buildings when the commentators are announced. I’ve had abuse for games I’m not even at. That makes you take it with a fair sprinkling of salt.”
One surprising innovation from Amazon’s football coverage is an audio preference which allows you to dispense with commentary entirely. “It was amusing in the early days when Jon [Champion] was offering that option himself – if you don’t want to listen to me, you don’t have to,” says Hornett. “We’re looking to make the experience the ultimate for the fan that you are. That requires nobody having egos and it’s an option that very few people use.”
“Mostly my family,” chimes in Champion.
“It never bothered me,” he says. “It’s part of the commentator’s job not to get in the way of the viewer’s enjoyment of the game. Earlier in one’s career, there is a tendency to think ‘I’ve got to make an impression here’, and that’s actually one of the worst things you can do.
“As you put more miles on the clock, have more experiences and get more feedback, you feel more comfortable in your own skin and relatively secure about yourself. You get to the stage where you think, actually, I’m better serving the audience by easing off a bit here and just letting them enjoy the spectacle, because that is the star.
“There’s a certain bravery in doing that as a broadcaster, in being able to leave what others might perceive as dead air and let people enjoy the crowd and just breathe things in. And I think the amount that you speak is often an inverse proportion to the amount of attention that’s paid to the words that you produce.”
So what does the future hold? We have made 10 bold predictions for the next era of commentary.
Ever-more distracted viewers will require commentators to signpost moments of excitement more forcefully. “Sometimes a commentator’s job now is to get a little bit more excited when the ball is getting close to the goal, to alert people that are doing something else,” says Matterface. “It gives you an indication that oh, we better look up now from the second screen.”
As if three-person gantry crews for big games was not enough we can expect further expansion “There will be more experimentation with how the role of the co-commentator is played,” says Hornett “Two of them, three of them.” Which brave broadcaster will go with the 11-pundit line-up, one for each player?
Broadcasters may be tempted to squeeze more pundits into the gantry
All-but inevitable for thrifty broadcasters covering smaller matches. It is hard to see much of an upside here. “If they ever bring in AI commentary it will be a disaster,” says Pearce. “It will be robotic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a TV magnate somewhere around the world is dreaming that up. It would be like an old PS2 game. It wouldn’t be spontaneous, it wouldn’t be human, it would be awful.”
For decades this country has taken its sports broadcasting cues from the United States. While NFL coverage remains particularly influential, America’s hegemonic cultural clout is waning. Ref cam, debuting this season in the Premier League, was first used in Germany. Ideas can spread further and faster than ever before and perhaps tomorrow’s commentators might pick up ideas from, for example, Korean baseball.
A standard feature in many American sports, where viewers can often pick a home or visitor’s commentary team. “I think it will go very club-orientated,” says Matterface. “I hope it doesn’t. I hope we always have a neutral broadcaster, but I can see a time 10-15 years in the future when it changes.” Highly likely, given the eternal claims of bias from fans of every football club.
Any lingering formality will be stripped out. Of course this will be difficult for older football fans to adjust to, just as it is jarring for 60-somethings to hear the Prodigy on Radio 2. Some resist the notion that it is necessary. “People in broadcasting are obsessed with attracting younger listeners or viewers,” says Murray. “There is merit in that, you do have to do that. But at the same time I think what people often forget is that actually people get older.”
There will always be a proportion of football fans who actively prefer to listen than to watch, but radio audiences are traditionally boosted by those in transit, especially in the car. High-end cars increasingly feature TVs, and if self-driving models take off many will choose to watch rather than listen.
Accurately telling the viewer who was in possession was once the most important part of commentary. “You need three eyes to do the job,” says Tyler, which sounds difficult. “Identification, information, interpretation, three ‘I’s.” But the first was most critical in days of grainy black-and-white TV sets, while the average size and definition of a living room telly these days can make lists of player names sound borderline patronising.
Could Wayne Rooney one day switch from punditry to commentating? - Getty Images/Glyn Kirk
Football is an exception for not making commentary stars of its former players, with no Michael Atherton, Peter Alliss or Wayne Mardle figures as yet. Retiring players work as pundits or summarisers instead. “In almost every other sport that you can think of, some top former players have turned into commentators,” says Murray. “It is bound to happen.”
While the crackling tapes from the dawn of commentary nearly 100 years ago demonstrate a very different approach it is remarkable how quickly commentary matured. Giants of the form have taken it forward but the job remains basically unchanged: inform the audience and enhance their enjoyment of the sport. There will be tonal shifts, as there are in every area of life, but tomorrow’s commentators will largely continue in the lineage of their predecessors.
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In the beginning there was Hamilton Fyfe, newspaper editor, playwright and twice-failed candidate for Parliament. In 1926 he travelled to the United States to write a Radio Times article titled “The Way They Live in America”. It included an account of a radio broadcast of American football with “a continuous description of the play”.
The following year the BBC attempted rugby in the same style. Football arrived on the airwaves a week later, Arsenal vs Sheffield United on January 22, 1927. It was announced in that day’s Telegraph, but only after a screed beginning: “One so often hears stories of radio listeners who, disgusted at the poor quality of the British Broadcasting Corporation programmes, prefer foreign programmes.”
On the day of the game at Highbury, Teddy Wakelam, a former rugby player for Harlequins, climbed into a small wooden hut behind the goal to give the first ever football commentary.
Earlier this year, nearly a century later, Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Savage celebrated a Manchester United goal with deafening exuberance on the gantry, filmed by cameras hoping to capture a viral moment. How did we get here?
The past
The square roots of football commentary
Listeners to the Arsenal vs Sheffield United game in 1927 were grappling with an unfamiliar form of broadcasting. They were helped by a diagram printed in the Radio Times which divided the pitch into eight squares. The few archive recordings which survive from these days have commentary punctuated by stiff interjections from a colleague as the ball moves between sections: “number two! number four!”. The person in the square-calling role became known as Dr Watson, although etymologists believe the phrase “back to square one”, commonly attributed this era, is more likely derived from snakes and ladders.
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The Radio Times supplied this grid with the pitch divided into numbered sections so listeners would know where the action was during the first BBC radio football commentary - Radio Times/BBC
The Times called commentator Wakelam’s work “notably vivid and impressive” and The Spectator said “that type of broadcasting has come to stay”. Two days later the Telegraph review suggested football had been more successful than rugby on the radio, with praise for the improved acoustics in Wakelam’s portable commentary shed which had reduced distracting crowd noise.
Our wireless correspondent reported from the control room at Highbury: “I was able to compare the relative merits of watching and listening. In view of the dismal conditions outside, the bad visibility and the depressing prevalence of mud and snow, I should have preferred the radio, but real soccer enthusiasts will doubtless disagree.” Later in the same article, to give some idea of the wider radio climate, there are details of a forthcoming debate about “The Menace of the Leisured Woman”.
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How The Daily Telegraph reported the first sports commentary in 1927
Some clubs were less keen on commentary. Nottingham Forest’s chairman H.R. Cobbin refused a BBC request to cover their game against Preston in February 1927, saying “There is no benefit to football clubs for their matches to be broadcast. It is obvious that in wet weather the club would suffer very considerably financially.”
But a year later commentary was established enough for the BBC yearbook to identify a theme which persists: “The perfect commentator… does not exist. There are, indeed, commentators who can please all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but there never has been found, and there never will be, the man who will please all the people all the time.” Or, as Barry Davies was fond of saying, “One man’s commentator is another man’s pain in the a---.”
Birth of the curse
Nearly a decade after its first radio commentary the BBC began broadcasting football on television, a specially arranged fixture between Arsenal and Arsenal reserves on September 16, 1937. Thomas Woodrooffe was on duty for the following year’s Cup final, between Huddersfield and Preston. A former naval officer, Woodrooffe spoke in clipped and proper tones, pronouncing “off” as “orf”. He is also responsible for the first recorded example of the commentator’s curse.
We join him with two minutes left in extra time: “Another goal kick for Huddersfield, and I’ll eat my hat if there’s any score before this whistle goes [for full time].” Shortly afterwards Preston won a penalty, which George Mutch scored. Woodrooffe appeared on the TV programme Picture Page a week later to eat a hat-shaped cake.
After a pause in football during the Second World War, the years that followed brought floodlights, the European Cup and Raymond Glendenning, who commentated on every FA Cup final from 1946 to 1963 for the BBC, resplendent in horn-rimmed glasses and handlebar moustache. “My father-in-law used to go and watch football at Roker Park and would tell me that when Glendenning would turn up he was revered as a real star,” says John Murray, the BBC’s current football correspondent.
There was some live coverage of the 1954 and 1958 World Cups on TV, but games from Chile in 1962 were shown days later. Match of the Day made its debut in 1964, two years before the big bang of modern football commentary.
1966 and all that
By the World Cup of 1966 the BBC’s radio coverage of football had turned up the crowd noise. The basic sound and rhythm of modern radio commentary are in place. When Roger Hunt scored for England in their final group game against France, Brian Moore lets the crowd cheer before interjecting.
There is some tactical awareness, France’s formation is remarked upon but called “their 4-3-3 situation”. There are plenty of pauses too, gaps in which you would now be hearing from a pundit. Moore was punchy enough to go without in his summary: “The time is coming when you’re running out of excuses for England. I’ve believed all along that they stand a tremendous chance of winning this World Cup, but for the first time tonight I have my doubts now, because England, as I say, really didn’t look the part.” Fortunately those doubts were misplaced.
A fourth goal in a triumphant World Cup final would always have been remembered, but Kenneth Wolstenholme’s words elevated Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick for eternity. Securing a signature line like Wolstenholme’s has become a rite of passage for top-level commentators. But writing for The Telegraph in 1991 he chastised himself: “What else could I say as Hurst shot? Maybe there was a hint of happiness and triumph in the words, unforgivable for a commentator who had to be impartial”.
Bryon Butler became the BBC football correspondent from 1968, leading the radio effort. The Big Match arrived on the newly regionalised ITV in the same year as challenger to MotD. A year later Mary Raine became the first woman to report on a football match, on Sports Report in 1969. Reaction to her work was largely positive, although there was some condescension from Michael Carey in The Observer: “I do hope one of her colleagues will put her right, that all Sunderland need to do is give the ball to someone who can give it a mighty wallop from 30 yards. It is in the penalty area it counts, my dear.”
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Mary Raine’s landmark broadcast was big news
From the 70s to year zero
The idea of the “breathless” commentator could have been invented for Butler. In between sentences you could hear his inhalations, like the vocals of Matt Bellamy on the first two Muse albums. Passages of play in his Chelsea vs Leeds FA Cup final of 1970 become staccato surnames, with some attempts of self-aware poetry in slower moments. Eddie Gray is “one of the Leeds players with bewildering ball control, so dextrous with the feet, if that’s not a paradox in saying that”. Butler sounds as if he might cry when Leeds make it 2-1.
By now football’s audience were familiar with a growing cast of commentators. “David Coleman was incredible,” says Murray. “He’s so ahead of his time, he is so forthright.” On TV there was the rise of a nerdier sort with John Motson. “His fruity, lilting, faintly swottish tones are borrowed when schoolboys smash in volleys on the playground and by punters in pubs, emitting squeals of delight at a goal going in on TV. We are all John Motson sometimes,” wrote Paul Hayward on these pages in1995.
“Motty was remarkably assiduous in what he did,” says Jon Champion, who joined the BBC in the late 1980s. “John and Barry Davies were a great contrast.” Both prepared thoroughly but “Motty could tell you the inside leg measurement of the Crystal Palace right-back, whereas Barry was much more about being taken by the moment and expressing the emotion that swept over him.”
By the 1970s Motson and his peers had to make some room in the commentary box. “A lovely story which Motty told me about co-commentary was somebody had this idea that Jimmy Hill would join David Coleman,” says Clive Tyldesley. “Coleman was against it, but apparently the compromise was he agreed to have Hill alongside him, as long as there was only one microphone.”
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David Coleman was initially resistant to having Jimmy Hill (pictured) alongside him in the commentary box - BBC
Around this time some viewers were pining for the quieter style of the previous decades. In a 1977 Telegraph article headlined “Are they learning to keep quiet?” TV critic Sean Day-Lewis recounted: “I was much gratified the other day to meet Bill Ward, the highly mobile chairman of the ITV Sport Committee and hear him say that ‘commentators talk too much’.
“Where is the fault worst, I wondered? ‘Football’, he suggested. We did not progress much beyond this. Nobody is going to tell Brian Moore that he talks too much, not even in the cool of evening much less in the heat of a game.”
Nevertheless Day-Lewis predicted a better future: “I forecast that there will be a genuine move towards fewer abhorrent effusions.”
At least British audiences were on familiar stylistic ground with their commentators. In a 1986 letter from the Mexico World Cup Michael Calvin was aghast about the standard of American coverage. “An English viewer weaned on the intelligent analysis of commentators like John Motson and Martin Tyler would scarcely believe the banality of the presentation. They scream ‘bingo’ when a goal is scored and litter commentaries with incomprehensible phrases like ‘a great foot trap’ or ‘an on-path into the penalty zone’.”
Three 90s changes
After the 1990 World Cup provoked a wave of popularity which football still surfs, commentary began to change at speed. Most significant was the entry of Sky to UK television sports broadcasting. Expert pundits alongside commentators became the default, most notably with the pairing of Andy Gray and Tyler.
“We were in the right place at the right time,” says Tyler. “We felt like we were pioneers. The commentary was me and Ian Darke, and as soon as the incident happened Andy did the replay. The first replay, not the fifth.
“It’s a team game. The thing about going from ITV to Sky was that everyone working in the Sky team was football mad. At ITV you’d get cameramen who were mainly working on Coronation Street. I remember once when I was working someone said ‘which one is Dalglish?’”
As late as the mid 1980s ITV and BBC were still showing only a handful of live Division One matches per season, which led to a certain discipline. “Because it was highlights you had to be fairly clipped,” says Tyler. “You had to stop talking before the slow-motion replay finished, then they could cut the picture and the sound together.”
Gray and his producers grasped that the modern pundit, or co-commentator as they became known, had to offer more than platitudes. This raised standards but led to some overreach. “Like Brazil’s Roberto Carlos, [Ron] Atkinson likes to come forward at every opportunity,” wrote Giles Smith for The Telegraph in 1998. “Reversing the traditional commentator/analyst relationship, Ron speaks whenever, and for however long, he likes and the commentator jumps in only when there is a gap. He has blurred the boundaries between attack and defence like no other analyst before him.”
On radio there was the launch of Radio 5 in 1990, reimagined as 5Live in 1994, switching focus from more eclectic speech programming to rolling news, topical talk and live sport. The tone became more casual, with a larger variety of accents and approaches. Belfast-born Alan Green became a key voice, often recalcitrant and unafraid to tell his listeners just how terrible a game was. He was an antidote to some of the accommodating cheerleading for the Premier League from other broadcasters.
Few were as noisy as Jonathan Pearce, lead commentator and sports editor of Capital Gold from the late 1980s, although his enthusiasm came from a purist’s enjoyment of the game. “His style was so radically different from what was going on on BBC Radio at the time,” says Murray. “I always felt he was commentating like it was in Roy of the Rovers, a comic-book style.” His coverage of Eric Cantona’s kick on a Crystal Palace fan in 1995 was a fair representation.
Capital Gold commentary
Pearce had taken some inspiration from overseas. “It was unbelievable hearing those snippets of Brazilian commentary and I wanted to mirror the excitement of the fans,” he says. These days his style is more toned-down, and better-suited to TV but you can hear echoes of the exuberant Pearce radio style across great swathes of modern commentary. “If that’s true I’d be very proud to have played that part,” he says. “I do hear Capital Gold-isms in some of the commentators now”.
The overall trend in football since the 90s is seemingly limitless growth. There are now more commentators than ever, to cover more broadcast football than seemed imaginable 30 years ago. How do today’s commentators assess the current state of their profession?
The present
Shouting in the evening
Everyone contacted for this article expressed some level of hesitation for one modern commentary trend.“It fills me with horror, I can understand why people do it but it’s absolutely not for me,” says Jacqui Oatley. “I can’t think of anything worse than being filmed while I’m commentating.”
“Never, never, never, ever, ever, never,” says Pearce. “I just think it’s an absolute ego fest. It’s about the event, it’s not about you, the commentary should never be about you.”
The desk-mounted gantry cam is the defining object of the current commentary landscape. We see our heroes hard at work, engaged in the action but due to the presence of the camera inevitably behaving performatively to some degree. It is perfect for social media, where match rights are restricted and unaccompanied audio rarely thrives as a viral property. Murray is about the most optimistic voice on the subject: “It does demonstrate and spread the word about what we do, so therefore it’s good for business, but that’s not how radio is supposed to be. I am positive about it because people see it and people are nice about it.”
Coleman’s old battle for control over one microphone has been lost, now commentators feel almost secondary to the people alongside them. In fact some of the defining lines of the recent Premier League: “Mo Salah, you little dancer” or “Where do you want your statue, Vincent Kompany?” have come from the co-commentary position.
Sometimes the commentator feels almost forgotten. “One thing about the way it is now which is both beneficial and tough for commentators is there’s so much going on with the studio guests that your commentary isn’t listened to word for word,” says Tyler. “There’s some very good producers out there but they’ve got so much on their plate.”
More voices, less familiarity
Perhaps the increasing workload for commentators is to blame for this change in focus. It is common for today’s top voices to work four matches in a week. Writing in 1992 for The Telegraph, Motson proudly stated he had “covered 40 matches for the BBC last season – a comfortable average of almost one a week”.
Some say they prefer to stay as engaged as possible by commentating at least every other day. “I find it easier when I’m working all the time, because I feel like I’m across the overarching narratives,” says ITV’s lead commentator Sam Matterface. That work is increasingly tiring.
“The game changes, we’ve just gone through a period where the ball basically doesn’t go out of play,” he says. “You don’t get as many replays, so you don’t get that breathing space and it’s constant action. Even when Manchester City have got the ball on the halfway line, one line-breaking pass, you’ve got to be in there. You can’t switch off. That probably precipitates more talking, because you’ve always got to be ready for the next moment.”
The word count might be up and so is the cast list. Some nostalgic viewers yearn for the lost days of definitive voices for each sport. “To build up a relationship with millions of people that you will never meet, and for them to develop an affection for you and a trust of you is broadcasting magic,” says Tyldesley. He does not foresee a return. “That box in the corner of that room used to be the family’s box, now there are 15 screens in the house. Mass communal viewing, the 28 million that I commentated to for a World Cup semi-final, you don’t get those opportunities any more.”
Diversity, of a sort
Oatley became the first female commentator on MotD, taking Fulham vs Blackburn in 2007. “I thought I’d be able to sneak onto the gantry at Craven Cottage but I was naive to think that because unfortunately it leaked to a national paper on the Tuesday before the Saturday. I was just extremely grateful to get through it and onto the next one because after that it was never a big deal again.”
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Jacqui Oatley makes broadcasting history at Craven Cottage in 2007 - Getty Images/Julian Finney
She encountered double standards. Some accused her of lacking the necessary playing experience to cover football, but Oatley only turned to broadcasting because her football career was curtailed by a serious knee injury. “I remember going to my second MotD commentary and seeing a male colleague in the pressroom who said ‘the weirdest thing about all that was that you were getting stick for not having played’. He said, ‘I’ve never played, and no one’s ever asked whether I have’.”
The race and gender of lead commentators in men’s football is fairly uniform, but the incumbents approach their job in different styles. Darren Fletcher on TNT Sport is unpretentious, straddling the world of players and fans. Guy Mowbray, the BBC TV lead commentator is a master of economy. Matterface, his ITV equivalent, is fond of a quip. Murray, BBC Sport’s football correspondent, and primary voice of 5Live commentary is transparently influenced by his love of cricket and Test Match Special.
Sky Sports replaced Tyler with the poetic stylings of Peter Drury, a man who marked Cristiano Ronaldo’s return to Manchester United as follows: “Wreathed in red. Restored to this great gallery of the game. A walking work of art. Vintage, beyond valuation, beyond forgery or imitation, 18 years since that trembling teenager of touch and tease first tiptoed onto this storied stage stage. Now in his immaculate maturity, CR7, reunited”.
A broadcaster’s overall tone is defined by its choice of commentator. “When you’re launching a new venture, the brand is important,” says Andrew Hornett, Prime Video’s director of live sports. He led Amazon into the football broadcasting world after similar previous work for Setanta and ESPN. “The selection of commentator is one of the most important decisions you can make,” says Hornett. “The kind of things that we’re looking for are credibility, authority, reputation, eloquence, use of language, deep knowledge of the sport, experience, charisma, sense of humour.
“For Amazon, joy is important, it’s important to enjoy it. If we’re looking at talent, we might even put numbers to each of those categories and analyse them.”
When numbers go too far
The biggest change in the career of most active commentators has been the free availability of information online. A well-thumbed Rothmans annual was once the commentator’s best friend. Now each has numerous websites and video platforms to help them prepare.
“My first game was Wakefield against Worksop Town in the Unibond Premier League in 2003, when lower and non-league player information was almost non-existent online,” says Oatley. “There were no YouTube clips or anything like that. My main recollection is of the really low commentary position in the corner, the players were miles away, and they all looked the same.”
Sometimes it feels as if the viewer is bombarded with stats regardless of their usefulness. “I don’t like stats for the sake of stats, I want my stats to tell a story,” says Oatley. “You might see a goalkeeper has made 10 saves in a match, but nine of them were pea-rollers, they don’t count as saves in real life I don’t think.”
“I hate the amount of statistical information which is now arbitrarily projected onto the screen at a time when it’s totally irrelevant to what we’ve just seen,” says Tyldesley. “I feel that anything that appears on the screen I should relate to as a commentator, because the visual is more important than the audio.”
Intense preparation for games is a non-negotiable, almost a fetishised aspect of the job. Tyldesley produces A3 sheets with top-of-the-class handwriting for every match, and sells reproductions of his notes for famous games online. “When people see my commentary charts they say ‘you’ll need all that in case the game gets quiet’,” he says. “No, that’s not what it’s for. And it’s not a safety net either, it’s a comfort blanket. I would say as a rough estimate if I use more than 10 per cent I’d probably start to bore people.
“My feeling about research is that it’s incumbent on the lead commentator to know more about the backdrop to the game than anybody watching. The skill isn’t doing the research, it’s how, if and when you use it.”
You can write a script like this
Most commentators have been accused of pre-preparing lines. Most will freely admit that they think in detail about a forthcoming game and how it will pan out. Few will cop to writing bon mots in advance. “You might write something down and think ‘oh I might use that’, then you do and it’ll sound naff,” says Matterface. “Some of the best lines come to you in a blind panic.”
Pearce remembers trying to recapture an off-the-cuff moment: “I did a line saying ‘Tony Adams bears the brunt of the donkey chants from away fans but eeyore, eeyore ee-yalways gets it right for Arsenal’ that went down well and was spontaneous.
“Then about six months later I did pre-prepare a line and it came out disastrously. Nowadays I hear that quite a lot in other commentators. I can tell and I’m sure the listeners and viewers can too because it’s clunky, like changing from fifth down to first. It goes from being ad-libbed to a script they’ve written down.”
Knowing how and when to deploy your research and how to improvise only comes from experience. This is often compared to flying, pilots needing to log a certain number of air miles to become trustworthy. “You can go on courses on how to be a commentator,” says Champion. “They’ll give you all the technical advice in the world, but they don’t tell you what to do if something goes wrong, or if something comes out of your mouth that shouldn’t have and how you get out of that nasty corner. For that reason, you’ve just got to get out there and do it.”
Those who thrive tend to be self-critical. But there is now another critical audience to contend with. “I try not to tweet too much before a game that I’m doing because then you’re almost inciting, you’re putting your hand up like a beacon ‘if you don’t like my commentary here’s where to come to slag it off’,” says Oatley.
“I always say that it’s a more perilous job than high-wire trapeze or brain surgery, because most people in the country accept that they can’t do those,” says Tyldesley. “But everybody thinks they can be a commentator. The worst brain surgeon in the world doesn’t get any criticism, because people don’t want to do that.
“You get people sniping, the memes of people hanging themselves and jumping off high buildings when the commentators are announced. I’ve had abuse for games I’m not even at. That makes you take it with a fair sprinkling of salt.”
Tune in, turn off
One surprising innovation from Amazon’s football coverage is an audio preference which allows you to dispense with commentary entirely. “It was amusing in the early days when Jon [Champion] was offering that option himself – if you don’t want to listen to me, you don’t have to,” says Hornett. “We’re looking to make the experience the ultimate for the fan that you are. That requires nobody having egos and it’s an option that very few people use.”
“Mostly my family,” chimes in Champion.
“It never bothered me,” he says. “It’s part of the commentator’s job not to get in the way of the viewer’s enjoyment of the game. Earlier in one’s career, there is a tendency to think ‘I’ve got to make an impression here’, and that’s actually one of the worst things you can do.
“As you put more miles on the clock, have more experiences and get more feedback, you feel more comfortable in your own skin and relatively secure about yourself. You get to the stage where you think, actually, I’m better serving the audience by easing off a bit here and just letting them enjoy the spectacle, because that is the star.
“There’s a certain bravery in doing that as a broadcaster, in being able to leave what others might perceive as dead air and let people enjoy the crowd and just breathe things in. And I think the amount that you speak is often an inverse proportion to the amount of attention that’s paid to the words that you produce.”
The future
So what does the future hold? We have made 10 bold predictions for the next era of commentary.
1. More shouting
Ever-more distracted viewers will require commentators to signpost moments of excitement more forcefully. “Sometimes a commentator’s job now is to get a little bit more excited when the ball is getting close to the goal, to alert people that are doing something else,” says Matterface. “It gives you an indication that oh, we better look up now from the second screen.”
2. Pundit panel inflation
As if three-person gantry crews for big games was not enough we can expect further expansion “There will be more experimentation with how the role of the co-commentator is played,” says Hornett “Two of them, three of them.” Which brave broadcaster will go with the 11-pundit line-up, one for each player?
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Broadcasters may be tempted to squeeze more pundits into the gantry
3. AI incursions
All-but inevitable for thrifty broadcasters covering smaller matches. It is hard to see much of an upside here. “If they ever bring in AI commentary it will be a disaster,” says Pearce. “It will be robotic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a TV magnate somewhere around the world is dreaming that up. It would be like an old PS2 game. It wouldn’t be spontaneous, it wouldn’t be human, it would be awful.”
4. Looking beyond America
For decades this country has taken its sports broadcasting cues from the United States. While NFL coverage remains particularly influential, America’s hegemonic cultural clout is waning. Ref cam, debuting this season in the Premier League, was first used in Germany. Ideas can spread further and faster than ever before and perhaps tomorrow’s commentators might pick up ideas from, for example, Korean baseball.
5. Club-specific commentators
A standard feature in many American sports, where viewers can often pick a home or visitor’s commentary team. “I think it will go very club-orientated,” says Matterface. “I hope it doesn’t. I hope we always have a neutral broadcaster, but I can see a time 10-15 years in the future when it changes.” Highly likely, given the eternal claims of bias from fans of every football club.
6. An ever-brasher style
Any lingering formality will be stripped out. Of course this will be difficult for older football fans to adjust to, just as it is jarring for 60-somethings to hear the Prodigy on Radio 2. Some resist the notion that it is necessary. “People in broadcasting are obsessed with attracting younger listeners or viewers,” says Murray. “There is merit in that, you do have to do that. But at the same time I think what people often forget is that actually people get older.”
7. Radio wanes
There will always be a proportion of football fans who actively prefer to listen than to watch, but radio audiences are traditionally boosted by those in transit, especially in the car. High-end cars increasingly feature TVs, and if self-driving models take off many will choose to watch rather than listen.
8. ID not required
Accurately telling the viewer who was in possession was once the most important part of commentary. “You need three eyes to do the job,” says Tyler, which sounds difficult. “Identification, information, interpretation, three ‘I’s.” But the first was most critical in days of grainy black-and-white TV sets, while the average size and definition of a living room telly these days can make lists of player names sound borderline patronising.
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Could Wayne Rooney one day switch from punditry to commentating? - Getty Images/Glyn Kirk
9. Rise of the player turned commentator
Football is an exception for not making commentary stars of its former players, with no Michael Atherton, Peter Alliss or Wayne Mardle figures as yet. Retiring players work as pundits or summarisers instead. “In almost every other sport that you can think of, some top former players have turned into commentators,” says Murray. “It is bound to happen.”
10. Fundamentals will stay the same
While the crackling tapes from the dawn of commentary nearly 100 years ago demonstrate a very different approach it is remarkable how quickly commentary matured. Giants of the form have taken it forward but the job remains basically unchanged: inform the audience and enhance their enjoyment of the sport. There will be tonal shifts, as there are in every area of life, but tomorrow’s commentators will largely continue in the lineage of their predecessors.
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