“I’m Focused on the Present, Not the Past”: How Martin Tyler Became One of Football’s Greatest Commentators
It was September 14, 1945. England was celebrating the end of World War II, and over in the cathedral city of Chester, a baby was being born: Martin Tyler.
Tyler took a liking to cricket thanks to his maternal side, which had boasted two generations of family members who played for Cheshire at the county level, and he even ended up playing for Surrey’s U-18s and captaining his university side. However, it was always football that was Tyler’s first love, having attended his first-ever match in 1953, watching Woking FC beat local rivals Kingstonian in the first round of the FA Amateur Cup. 13 years later, he watched England defeat France in the World Cup at Wembley, before watching from the TV screen as the Three Lions won their first and only major international trophy.
Breaking into the Broadcasting Industry
After graduating from the University of East Anglia, Tyler balanced his time between working in market research and playing in England’s lower leagues during the weekends, before eventually deciding to return to his studies in Norwich and write a novel that would go unpublished. In 1971, Tyler started a month-long trial with Marshall Cavendish Book of Football, a weekly partwork covering the sport, which allowed him to watch tapes of football matches at London Weekend Television, in addition to working as a ghostwriter on football pundit Jimmy Hill’s column in The Times.
LWT would end up offering him a job as an editorial assistant, which, at Hill’s behest, Tyler ended up taking at the expense of his fledgling playing career. He worked production behind the scenes on LWT’s The Big Match, but he nevertheless harbored ambitions of a role in commentary and decided to commentate on a football match on a tape recorder before submitting it to his superiors.
Shortly after that, with ITV’s Gerry Williams unavailable, Tyler was given the chance to make his commentary debut in a Second Division match between Southampton and Sheffield Wednesday on December 28, 1974. He was asked to return just six weeks later and quickly became a regular commentator, eventually graduating to Yorkshire Television and making his mark on his ITV Sport bosses, so much so that they included him in their team for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, before returning to his native North West and joining Granada Television (now ITV Granada).
Tyler spent the 1980s establishing himself as one of the United Kingdom’s top commentators alongside the likes of Derek Rae, leading ITV’s World Cup coverage during the 1982 edition in Spain and covering every single England match as well as the final, in addition to playing a leading role in the 1984 Euros and 1986 World Cup. And in 1988, he travelled Down Under for the Australia Bicentenary Gold Cup to commentate a one-off tournament between Australia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, and Brazil.
“14 years after I started, I went to Australia as a guest of ABC Australia to commentate on a competition to celebrate the country’s 200-year anniversary. They didn’t really want an English commentator to come in, but they felt that they hadn’t quite gotten it staffed, so I went and was treated with a bit more reverence,” stated Tyler in an exclusive R.org interview. “I remember being asked to sit in the studio and talk about the game, and I thought, ‘I’m really happy with this. I think I can do this.’ All young commentators will go through that experience, but it won’t take 14 years, because of the sheer volume of games – now, you can do 14 years of experience in 4 years. I did the 1978 World Cup, the 1982 World Cup – the only time I did the final for British television – and then I did the 86 World Cup. I did up to the semi-final in 1986, and a senior broadcaster (Brian Moore) came out and did the final in Mexico. I’d done quite a lot of England games, but it still took me that time before I felt that all the moving parts were moving in the right places.”
But whilst Tyler cemented his status as one of the United Kingdom’s most revered broadcasters, he nevertheless remained situated as ITV’s #2 commentator behind Moore. It’s why, at the urging of his agent John Hockey, he signed a deal with British Satellite Broadcasting’s Sports Channel in 1990. It was here where he covered live FA Cup games, England international matches, and the Scottish Premiership; however, Tyler’s voice remained on ITV for another two years as they carried the commentaries he did for the Football League’s overseas broadcasts. During that timeframe, British Satellite Broadcasting would merge with Sky and become what is now known as Sky Sports, with Sky becoming the broadcaster of the newly formed FA Premier League. And on August 16, 1992, Tyler commentated on the first pay-TV match in the history of the English football championship, as Nottingham Forest defeated Liverpool 1-0 at the City Ground.
Overseeing the Revitalization of English Football
In addition to his regular work with ITV and Sky, Tyler assumed a great deal of freelance work, from commentating on the Freight Rover Trophy Area in 1985 and the Screensport Super Cup in 1986, as well as CONMEBOL qualifiers for the 1990 FIFA World Cup for Screensport, to serving as a regular on Octagon CSI’s international feed of Serie A alongside Peter Brackley from 1986 to 1993.
He also branched out to other sports like netball, cricket, and baseball – he even had the chance to announce one of the greatest World Series of all time, when the Boston Red Sox’s Bill Buckner allowed the ball to slip between his legs and allowed the New York Mets to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Over the past quarter-century, Tyler has been able to spread his gospel to billions across the world thanks to his work as the default commentator for the FIFA video game series from 2005 to 2020, in addition to acting as a commentator in beloved football movies Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001) and Goal! (2005). From the UEFA Champions League to the FIFA World Cup, Tyler has had the chance to commentate on the most prestigious competitions in the entire sport, but it’s safe to say that his biggest legacy has come in the Premier League. Tyler was voted as the Premier League Commentator of the Decade by fans and a specially assembled panel of football experts in the Premier League 10 Seasons Awards in April 2003.
“I defended English football a lot when it was the crowd behavior that was wrecking it rather than what was happening on the field…we really had to work hard to improve that as a law enforcement, but it gradually got done. Back then, if you went out with your family and met people who didn’t know what you did, to say that you were involved in football was perhaps not the best subject to talk about over dinner. I was never ashamed of it, but I recognized that other people would look at it with disdain, and I understood why. But it got better, and then the initiative at the Premier League started, which put everything on a different footing. It was starting from scratch, really, although it wasn’t; all the clubs had been playing for years and years and years, but it was a new organization. Commercially, people got their act together, particularly Manchester United at the start – they won all of those titles during the early Premier League years, and part of that was down to the fact they were very smart off the field as well as on it.
They recognised the opportunities, and others followed. The tidying up of the grounds made hooligans have less of an incentive, and fans were treated well…why were they going to misbehave and risk not being able to go to the next game?” The other big thing was the arrival of live television. Back when I was growing up in the 1950s, the FA Cup Final was always shown, but there was a terrible fear that nobody will go to the game if it was broadcast live on TV. There was an experiment in the early 1960s where they would show one half of one game live in the First Division, and they abandoned the deal the next week and never followed up from it.”
“Suddenly, there was a sprinkling of live games on terrestrial television in the 80s, and the World Cup got bigger coverage. But the league being broadcast live was a big step forward, and the Premier League took that leap. Obviously, the only way it could work was behind a paywall, because it cost so much money for the broadcasters to acquire the rights. And instead of people staying away, they wanted to go to games. They wanted to be seen on television. Suddenly, that great fear became a myth, and now, around the globe, every Premier League game is broadcast live, but in the UK, we’re not far short of a next deal that will probably take every game onto our screens.
It’s been lovely to be involved; I’m the privileged one to have been part of it, because you can’t pick your time in life, but that pioneering period was very exciting. I was also lucky that I was at the right age and the right kind of experience to be offered the opportunity. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t Sky’s first choice, because it was a risk that this was maybe not going to work. I can remember going to the early games, going on the train from London up to Manchester, and we would go past cities on the way, like Stoke, and we’d see how many satellite dishes were up on the roofs, because you could actually look out and see whether your business was working or not. And we liked Stoke, because they had a lot of satellite dishes, but you go past other places, there’s no dishes, so it was quite insecure to start with, but it certainly isn’t now.”
Plenty of Oil Left in the Tank
Tyler hasn’t just established himself as a broadcasting icon in the United Kingdom, but in Australia and the United States, commentating on the FIFA World Cup, UEFA European Championship, and European club competition matches as well as Australian international matches for Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). He’s commentated each of the last eight World Cups for SBS, apart from the 2010 World Cup, which he worked for ESPN in the USA – that same year, Fox utilized Tyler’s Sky commentary to cover the 2010 UEFA Champions League Final, the first time that the final had been televised on a major American network. And for millions of Manchester City fans across the globe, who have now seen their team win six league titles and a Champions League title over the past decade, his commentary of Sergio Agüero’s last-gasp winner against QPR in 2012 is still the most iconic moment of their entire City fandom.
After stepping down as a commentator for Sky Sports after 33 years of service in 2023, many speculated that Tyler would hang up the microphone after a legendary half-century in the industry and enjoy a well-deserved retirement. Instead, he’s remained heavily involved with the game, from providing commentary for international broadcasters via Premier League Productions (PLP), to co-hosting The Joy of Football podcast alongside Neil Barnett. Furthermore he has also spent the past decades working as an assistant coach to Alan Dowson at semi-pro teams like Walton & Hersham, Kingstonian, Hampton & Richmond Borough, Dartford, Hemel Hempstead Town, as well as his boyhood club Woking. And this summer, he’ll be travelling to Dallas to commentate on his 13th FIFA World Cup for Host Broadcast Services.
“I’m focused on the present, not the past. The present is the most important thing – I’m only looking 48 hours into the future right now, when I’m going to commentate Fulham vs. Chelsea. very important. I just love what I do, and I’ve still got the capacity to do it. People who get older often say that retirement wasn’t quite what they expected it to be…the suggestion was that when I left Sky, or when Sky left me, I would retire. But I was never going to retire, and given good health and energy, I’ll keep doing it. It’s never been a decision of mine to stop. What would I do if I retired? I’d go to football matches. Every game is an examination, really. It’s a joyous experience of being able to broadcast it, but deep down, it’s an examination of how you’ve done. I like that: I like testing myself, and I’m very critical of myself.
Every commentator will tell you that after every game, you go through this process where you drive home and go, ‘Why did I say that, or why on earth didn’t I say that? It’s just part of the job. That’s not a pressure, that’s just a fact of life. It’s never been a decision to stop. Sky said, ‘Thank you, you’ve been fine for us, but it’s time for us to go in a different direction. That was their decision and I totally understood that. So, what did I do? I went and found someone else who’d let me shout ‘Goal!’ for a living.”
“I want to keep going as long as my body and my eyesight and my voice allow me to do it, and that’s probably for other people to judge. Months before the 2022 World Cup Final in Qatar, I was asked to do a radio interview to promote the coverage for the SBS, and the interviewer said, ‘How does it feel when you’re gonna go and do your last World Cup game? I just went, ‘What are you telling me? Do you know something that I don’t?’ He just looked at my birth certificate and figured it would be my last.
From that moment on, I was determined to do another World Cup game…instead of saying, ‘It’s a fair question because of my age,’ it prodded me to work another tournament. From 1974 to 2026, the target has only ever been the next game. You do the next game, and then the moment it’s over, you can think about the next one. But don’t think about five months ahead, and don’t bother about what’s happened, because you can’t change that. The only thing that you can control is how you do the next game.”