Last year, the Shipping Forecast – an icon of British radio – turned 100. The programme, broadcast at least twice every day, is a series of weather reports for different areas of the seas surrounding the UK. It’s made up of words that would make very little sense to anyone who isn’t a professional sailor, but its 100th birthday inspired an outpouring of devotion from the British public.
Books were released, special programming was aired to celebrate the big day, and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker even read a one-off forecast. Despite it not being as useful any more, given the advent of digital navigation, the Shipping Forecast remains utterly beloved, and any attempt to remove it from the radio would bring genuine outcry. Once, after a technical fault meant it failed to broadcast, the blunder literally made national news.
In comparison, when another fixture of British radio celebrated an anniversary recently, there was little to no fanfare. The BBC’s Sports Report has been airing since 1948, making it the world’s longest-running sports radio programme. Not only were there no reams of adoring newspaper column inches devoted to its 75th birthday in 2023, the BBC quietly discontinued an iconic part of the programming just before the milestone – the classified football results, in which a presenter would read every single score across all the English and Scottish leagues on a Saturday afternoon. It faded away without so much as an advance warning from the BBC.
Have a read of this quote from former controller of BBC Radio 4 Mark Damazer: “It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English. It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend.” OK, fine, you caught me – he was talking about the Shipping Forecast, but could the same not apply to listening to football on the radio? Where actually is Accrington Stanley, anyway?
As you might be able to tell, I like listening to football on the radio. I’m here to try to convince you of the same, to advocate for the particular, peculiar joys of football with no screen, just voices over the airwaves. It has its own distinct sounds, rhythms and idiosyncrasies that combine to give it a special place in my heart. In today’s hyper-speed, commercial-driven world, it is a little bit of the old ways still alive and kicking, easily accessible for anyone with a working radio.
Listen to any football match on the radio and one thing you’ll immediately notice is the difference between radio and TV commentary; it is definitely a discipline that requires a specific skillset. I spoke to Pat Nevin, the ex-Chelsea and Scotland player who now works as a co-commentator for BBC Radio 5 Live, because I was curious about how it differs. He has done commentary in both mediums but focuses largely on radio now.
“On the television, you can leave space because people can see what’s happening. It’s much more sparse,” he explains. “If you can see the ball hitting the post, you don’t need to say that it hit the post – it’ll annoy people. On radio, there is more leeway; you can talk more. You develop narratives for the listener, give them things to listen out for. It’s why I enjoy doing radio more than TV, because there’s the breadth to do that.”
One game stands out to Nevin for that reason. “I did the Barcelona versus Real Madrid Champions League semi-final first leg in 2011 for BBC 5 Live. José Mourinho was employing some of the best tactics I’ve ever seen, which were working brilliantly to stop a far better Barcelona side. Covering that game on the radio was great because the best tacticians were going up against each other, and we had the time to describe it all to the listeners.”
Of course, radio commentary presents challenges as well as opportunities. If you watch the famous Martin Tyler “Agüeroooo!” moment, you’ll see that after he says Sergio Agüero’s name, he then stays silent for ten seconds, letting the images shown on screen convey the emotion. If you were listening to that on the radio, you’d know something monumental had happened, but you might not know what, and you definitely wouldn’t know how. The fact that listeners can’t see what’s happening means the commentator is their eyes and ears, and they have to strike the right balance between being informative and over-describing.
Getting across all the pertinent information while remaining engaging to listen to is a talent that strikes me as particularly difficult to master. “I always think along the terms of: if I was driving along and I’m getting bored on a four-hour drive, what would I want to hear?” says Nevin. “People need to know what’s going on, but if you tell the listener the pitch position every ten seconds, you won’t do anything else.”
Telling people exactly where on the pitch the action was taking place was evidently a concern for the BBC in 1927. For its first-ever football radio broadcast, it issued a pitch diagram in the Radio Times, split into a grid of eight numbered squares. Alongside the commentator, another voice constantly chimed in, informing the listener in which square the action was taking place.
The skill of radio commentators in describing the action quickly and clearly meant, perhaps luckily, that the grid system did not prove enduring. “There are tricks and tools you use,” Nevin says, when I ask him how he makes sure the listener has a clear picture of the action. “One of them is the fans. The listener can hear the fans in the background; they know, OK, there’s danger. There’s excitement. As long as you’ve told them who’s attacking, they’ll pick up on what’s happening.”
This taps into something else I love about listening to football on the radio. There’s an immediacy to it – the radio commentators are nearly always sat in the media tribune seats inside a stadium, which means they are pretty much penned in by supporters on all sides. Call me a romantic, but especially in some of the older grounds, there’s a magic to that – commentators 50 years ago would have been sitting on those wooden rows with desks doing much the same thing as they’re doing today, minus the laptops and phones. They’re in the middle of it all – if it’s a cold night, they have to wrap up warm just like every other fan in the stadium. And there are fans all around them cheering and commiserating and providing a constant backing track for their words.
This season, Nevin has commentated from inside a number of different iconic Champions League venues, including Galatasaray’s Ali Sami Yen Stadium when they took on (and beat) Liverpool in the league phase. “That was a memorable one,” he says. “The level of noise was unbelievable. It may well be the loudest game I’ve done.” Nevin was also at the Scotland vs Denmark World Cup qualifier when Scotland won in added time to clinch their spot. “I don’t know if that was louder than Galatasaray, but when you put what it meant to the country on top of it – 28 years of waiting – it was extraordinary.”
As a radio listener, I find that you’re more closely attuned to what the commentators are feeling – you’re entirely reliant on them to paint a picture for you, and you get caught up in that. To me, it makes the emotion around a game, especially one that really matters to you, feel more intense. There is an intimacy to listening to football on the radio that I just don’t think you find anywhere else.
I mentioned at the start of this article that the BBC recently axed its classified football results segment. In the course of writing, I discovered that someone online has built an AI bot which now reads the results every weekend in the voice of James Alexander Gordon – the iconic voice of the programme who held the role from 1974 until 2013. I understand the impulse – wanting to reinstate a lost tradition – but to me it misses the point. We liked listening to Gordon read the results because of the humanity of it all – hearing his voice rise and fall depending on the score, paying close attention to every intonation in the car home from a Saturday afternoon match with your family or friends.
That is the very essence of why I love football on the radio. It’s human in a way that I think really matters. It’s you and the voices and nothing else. It has no bells and whistles, no choice but to be down to earth in a way that modern football is becoming less and less but actually needs to be more and more.
Tune into BBC Radio 5 Live on a Champions League night and you’ll hear what I mean. It might be the biggest stage in European football, but the glitter and glamour are tempered somewhat: with the sudden interjection of English League Two results teleporting you from the Parc des Princes to Prenton Park; with the commentators often having to shout to make their voices heard over the crowd. It reminds us that no matter the level, it’s all football, and the human aspect is what matters. My grandparents – maybe even my great-grandparents – would have experienced football on the radio largely the same as I do today. I think that’s something worth celebrating, and I hope you might now too.
Last year, the Shipping Forecast – an icon of British radio – turned 100. The programme, broadcast at least twice every day, is a series of weather reports for different areas of the seas surrounding the UK. It’s made up of words that would make very little sense to anyone who isn’t a professional sailor, but its 100th birthday inspired an outpouring of devotion from the British public.
Books were released, special programming was aired to celebrate the big day, and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker even read a one-off forecast. Despite it not being as useful any more, given the advent of digital navigation, the Shipping Forecast remains utterly beloved, and any attempt to remove it from the radio would bring genuine outcry. Once, after a technical fault meant it failed to broadcast, the blunder literally made national news.
In comparison, when another fixture of British radio celebrated an anniversary recently, there was little to no fanfare. The BBC’s Sports Report has been airing since 1948, making it the world’s longest-running sports radio programme. Not only were there no reams of adoring newspaper column inches devoted to its 75th birthday in 2023, the BBC quietly discontinued an iconic part of the programming just before the milestone – the classified football results, in which a presenter would read every single score across all the English and Scottish leagues on a Saturday afternoon. It faded away without so much as an advance warning from the BBC.
Have a read of this quote from former controller of BBC Radio 4 Mark Damazer: “It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English. It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend.” OK, fine, you caught me – he was talking about the Shipping Forecast, but could the same not apply to listening to football on the radio? Where actually is Accrington Stanley, anyway?
As you might be able to tell, I like listening to football on the radio. I’m here to try to convince you of the same, to advocate for the particular, peculiar joys of football with no screen, just voices over the airwaves. It has its own distinct sounds, rhythms and idiosyncrasies that combine to give it a special place in my heart. In today’s hyper-speed, commercial-driven world, it is a little bit of the old ways still alive and kicking, easily accessible for anyone with a working radio.
Listen to any football match on the radio and one thing you’ll immediately notice is the difference between radio and TV commentary; it is definitely a discipline that requires a specific skillset. I spoke to Pat Nevin, the ex-Chelsea and Scotland player who now works as a co-commentator for BBC Radio 5 Live, because I was curious about how it differs. He has done commentary in both mediums but focuses largely on radio now.
“On the television, you can leave space because people can see what’s happening. It’s much more sparse,” he explains. “If you can see the ball hitting the post, you don’t need to say that it hit the post – it’ll annoy people. On radio, there is more leeway; you can talk more. You develop narratives for the listener, give them things to listen out for. It’s why I enjoy doing radio more than TV, because there’s the breadth to do that.”
One game stands out to Nevin for that reason. “I did the Barcelona versus Real Madrid Champions League semi-final first leg in 2011 for BBC 5 Live. José Mourinho was employing some of the best tactics I’ve ever seen, which were working brilliantly to stop a far better Barcelona side. Covering that game on the radio was great because the best tacticians were going up against each other, and we had the time to describe it all to the listeners.”
Of course, radio commentary presents challenges as well as opportunities. If you watch the famous Martin Tyler “Agüeroooo!” moment, you’ll see that after he says Sergio Agüero’s name, he then stays silent for ten seconds, letting the images shown on screen convey the emotion. If you were listening to that on the radio, you’d know something monumental had happened, but you might not know what, and you definitely wouldn’t know how. The fact that listeners can’t see what’s happening means the commentator is their eyes and ears, and they have to strike the right balance between being informative and over-describing.
Getting across all the pertinent information while remaining engaging to listen to is a talent that strikes me as particularly difficult to master. “I always think along the terms of: if I was driving along and I’m getting bored on a four-hour drive, what would I want to hear?” says Nevin. “People need to know what’s going on, but if you tell the listener the pitch position every ten seconds, you won’t do anything else.”
Telling people exactly where on the pitch the action was taking place was evidently a concern for the BBC in 1927. For its first-ever football radio broadcast, it issued a pitch diagram in the Radio Times, split into a grid of eight numbered squares. Alongside the commentator, another voice constantly chimed in, informing the listener in which square the action was taking place.
The skill of radio commentators in describing the action quickly and clearly meant, perhaps luckily, that the grid system did not prove enduring. “There are tricks and tools you use,” Nevin says, when I ask him how he makes sure the listener has a clear picture of the action. “One of them is the fans. The listener can hear the fans in the background; they know, OK, there’s danger. There’s excitement. As long as you’ve told them who’s attacking, they’ll pick up on what’s happening.”
This taps into something else I love about listening to football on the radio. There’s an immediacy to it – the radio commentators are nearly always sat in the media tribune seats inside a stadium, which means they are pretty much penned in by supporters on all sides. Call me a romantic, but especially in some of the older grounds, there’s a magic to that – commentators 50 years ago would have been sitting on those wooden rows with desks doing much the same thing as they’re doing today, minus the laptops and phones. They’re in the middle of it all – if it’s a cold night, they have to wrap up warm just like every other fan in the stadium. And there are fans all around them cheering and commiserating and providing a constant backing track for their words.
This season, Nevin has commentated from inside a number of different iconic Champions League venues, including Galatasaray’s Ali Sami Yen Stadium when they took on (and beat) Liverpool in the league phase. “That was a memorable one,” he says. “The level of noise was unbelievable. It may well be the loudest game I’ve done.” Nevin was also at the Scotland vs Denmark World Cup qualifier when Scotland won in added time to clinch their spot. “I don’t know if that was louder than Galatasaray, but when you put what it meant to the country on top of it – 28 years of waiting – it was extraordinary.”
As a radio listener, I find that you’re more closely attuned to what the commentators are feeling – you’re entirely reliant on them to paint a picture for you, and you get caught up in that. To me, it makes the emotion around a game, especially one that really matters to you, feel more intense. There is an intimacy to listening to football on the radio that I just don’t think you find anywhere else.
I mentioned at the start of this article that the BBC recently axed its classified football results segment. In the course of writing, I discovered that someone online has built an AI bot which now reads the results every weekend in the voice of James Alexander Gordon – the iconic voice of the programme who held the role from 1974 until 2013. I understand the impulse – wanting to reinstate a lost tradition – but to me it misses the point. We liked listening to Gordon read the results because of the humanity of it all – hearing his voice rise and fall depending on the score, paying close attention to every intonation in the car home from a Saturday afternoon match with your family or friends.
That is the very essence of why I love football on the radio. It’s human in a way that I think really matters. It’s you and the voices and nothing else. It has no bells and whistles, no choice but to be down to earth in a way that modern football is becoming less and less but actually needs to be more and more.
Tune into BBC Radio 5 Live on a Champions League night and you’ll hear what I mean. It might be the biggest stage in European football, but the glitter and glamour are tempered somewhat: with the sudden interjection of English League Two results teleporting you from the Parc des Princes to Prenton Park; with the commentators often having to shout to make their voices heard over the crowd. It reminds us that no matter the level, it’s all football, and the human aspect is what matters. My grandparents – maybe even my great-grandparents – would have experienced football on the radio largely the same as I do today. I think that’s something worth celebrating, and I hope you might now too.
Last year, the Shipping Forecast – an icon of British radio – turned 100. The programme, broadcast at least twice every day, is a series of weather reports for different areas of the seas surrounding the UK. It’s made up of words that would make very little sense to anyone who isn’t a professional sailor, but its 100th birthday inspired an outpouring of devotion from the British public.
Books were released, special programming was aired to celebrate the big day, and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker even read a one-off forecast. Despite it not being as useful any more, given the advent of digital navigation, the Shipping Forecast remains utterly beloved, and any attempt to remove it from the radio would bring genuine outcry. Once, after a technical fault meant it failed to broadcast, the blunder literally made national news.
In comparison, when another fixture of British radio celebrated an anniversary recently, there was little to no fanfare. The BBC’s Sports Report has been airing since 1948, making it the world’s longest-running sports radio programme. Not only were there no reams of adoring newspaper column inches devoted to its 75th birthday in 2023, the BBC quietly discontinued an iconic part of the programming just before the milestone – the classified football results, in which a presenter would read every single score across all the English and Scottish leagues on a Saturday afternoon. It faded away without so much as an advance warning from the BBC.
Have a read of this quote from former controller of BBC Radio 4 Mark Damazer: “It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English. It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend.” OK, fine, you caught me – he was talking about the Shipping Forecast, but could the same not apply to listening to football on the radio? Where actually is Accrington Stanley, anyway?
As you might be able to tell, I like listening to football on the radio. I’m here to try to convince you of the same, to advocate for the particular, peculiar joys of football with no screen, just voices over the airwaves. It has its own distinct sounds, rhythms and idiosyncrasies that combine to give it a special place in my heart. In today’s hyper-speed, commercial-driven world, it is a little bit of the old ways still alive and kicking, easily accessible for anyone with a working radio.
Listen to any football match on the radio and one thing you’ll immediately notice is the difference between radio and TV commentary; it is definitely a discipline that requires a specific skillset. I spoke to Pat Nevin, the ex-Chelsea and Scotland player who now works as a co-commentator for BBC Radio 5 Live, because I was curious about how it differs. He has done commentary in both mediums but focuses largely on radio now.
“On the television, you can leave space because people can see what’s happening. It’s much more sparse,” he explains. “If you can see the ball hitting the post, you don’t need to say that it hit the post – it’ll annoy people. On radio, there is more leeway; you can talk more. You develop narratives for the listener, give them things to listen out for. It’s why I enjoy doing radio more than TV, because there’s the breadth to do that.”
One game stands out to Nevin for that reason. “I did the Barcelona versus Real Madrid Champions League semi-final first leg in 2011 for BBC 5 Live. José Mourinho was employing some of the best tactics I’ve ever seen, which were working brilliantly to stop a far better Barcelona side. Covering that game on the radio was great because the best tacticians were going up against each other, and we had the time to describe it all to the listeners.”
Of course, radio commentary presents challenges as well as opportunities. If you watch the famous Martin Tyler “Agüeroooo!” moment, you’ll see that after he says Sergio Agüero’s name, he then stays silent for ten seconds, letting the images shown on screen convey the emotion. If you were listening to that on the radio, you’d know something monumental had happened, but you might not know what, and you definitely wouldn’t know how. The fact that listeners can’t see what’s happening means the commentator is their eyes and ears, and they have to strike the right balance between being informative and over-describing.
Getting across all the pertinent information while remaining engaging to listen to is a talent that strikes me as particularly difficult to master. “I always think along the terms of: if I was driving along and I’m getting bored on a four-hour drive, what would I want to hear?” says Nevin. “People need to know what’s going on, but if you tell the listener the pitch position every ten seconds, you won’t do anything else.”
Telling people exactly where on the pitch the action was taking place was evidently a concern for the BBC in 1927. For its first-ever football radio broadcast, it issued a pitch diagram in the Radio Times, split into a grid of eight numbered squares. Alongside the commentator, another voice constantly chimed in, informing the listener in which square the action was taking place.
The skill of radio commentators in describing the action quickly and clearly meant, perhaps luckily, that the grid system did not prove enduring. “There are tricks and tools you use,” Nevin says, when I ask him how he makes sure the listener has a clear picture of the action. “One of them is the fans. The listener can hear the fans in the background; they know, OK, there’s danger. There’s excitement. As long as you’ve told them who’s attacking, they’ll pick up on what’s happening.”
This taps into something else I love about listening to football on the radio. There’s an immediacy to it – the radio commentators are nearly always sat in the media tribune seats inside a stadium, which means they are pretty much penned in by supporters on all sides. Call me a romantic, but especially in some of the older grounds, there’s a magic to that – commentators 50 years ago would have been sitting on those wooden rows with desks doing much the same thing as they’re doing today, minus the laptops and phones. They’re in the middle of it all – if it’s a cold night, they have to wrap up warm just like every other fan in the stadium. And there are fans all around them cheering and commiserating and providing a constant backing track for their words.
This season, Nevin has commentated from inside a number of different iconic Champions League venues, including Galatasaray’s Ali Sami Yen Stadium when they took on (and beat) Liverpool in the league phase. “That was a memorable one,” he says. “The level of noise was unbelievable. It may well be the loudest game I’ve done.” Nevin was also at the Scotland vs Denmark World Cup qualifier when Scotland won in added time to clinch their spot. “I don’t know if that was louder than Galatasaray, but when you put what it meant to the country on top of it – 28 years of waiting – it was extraordinary.”
As a radio listener, I find that you’re more closely attuned to what the commentators are feeling – you’re entirely reliant on them to paint a picture for you, and you get caught up in that. To me, it makes the emotion around a game, especially one that really matters to you, feel more intense. There is an intimacy to listening to football on the radio that I just don’t think you find anywhere else.
I mentioned at the start of this article that the BBC recently axed its classified football results segment. In the course of writing, I discovered that someone online has built an AI bot which now reads the results every weekend in the voice of James Alexander Gordon – the iconic voice of the programme who held the role from 1974 until 2013. I understand the impulse – wanting to reinstate a lost tradition – but to me it misses the point. We liked listening to Gordon read the results because of the humanity of it all – hearing his voice rise and fall depending on the score, paying close attention to every intonation in the car home from a Saturday afternoon match with your family or friends.
That is the very essence of why I love football on the radio. It’s human in a way that I think really matters. It’s you and the voices and nothing else. It has no bells and whistles, no choice but to be down to earth in a way that modern football is becoming less and less but actually needs to be more and more.
Tune into BBC Radio 5 Live on a Champions League night and you’ll hear what I mean. It might be the biggest stage in European football, but the glitter and glamour are tempered somewhat: with the sudden interjection of English League Two results teleporting you from the Parc des Princes to Prenton Park; with the commentators often having to shout to make their voices heard over the crowd. It reminds us that no matter the level, it’s all football, and the human aspect is what matters. My grandparents – maybe even my great-grandparents – would have experienced football on the radio largely the same as I do today. I think that’s something worth celebrating, and I hope you might now too.
