Legendary commentator Clive Tyldesley is set to broadcast to the UK for the very last time next week.
Tyldesley, 70, will provide the soundtrack for Brighton vs Brentford on Amazon Prime Video, but the e-commerce giant is dropping Premier League coverage in 2025, meaning he will be without a UK-facing job.
Since leaving ITV this summer, where he had been for more than two decades, Tyldesley has continued to work for CBS, commentating on the Champions League alongside former England goalkeeper Rob Green for the US audience watching on Paramount+.
Tyldesley would happily keep covering the Premier League for another broadcaster as Amazon drops out, but with no offer on the table he believes Boxing Day and 27 December will be his last to be aired in the UK.
“I’ve realised a lot of my ambitions, and I’ve been really, really lucky. And I’m very grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had,” Tyldesley tells The i Paper.
“You’ll never hear ‘I’ve had the best times and it’s time for me to go’, until I feel it’s time for me to go, and I don’t. I really feel as if I can still do the job as well probably as anybody out there.”
Tyldesley stepped down from a role doing Premier League radio commentaries for talkSPORT because he felt uncomfortable with having to read out on-air betting advertisements, but says he would have accepted other offers if they had come in. He insists he is not retiring though, and still has two more years on his contract with CBS.
“If you look at the host broadcaster, whether it’s Sky or TNT, then add on Match of the Day, Premier League productions, then NBC would probably have a commentator at certain games, Five Live and talkSPORT certainly would, there’s at least 20 commentators working every weekend on mainstream coverage of Premier League football,” he adds.
“I may not be the best, but I think I’m in the top 20!
“It’s a competitive business. It’s like being selected for a football team and I am probably that ageing midfield player now who needs somebody to do a bit of the running for him. I’m 70, and there may come a time when I don’t see as clearly or think as sharply as I once did, but I don’t think that time has arrived as yet.
“I’m not somebody who says ‘you’ve got to be careful what you say these days’. Yeah, well, you should be, if you’re broadcasting to millions of people! You don’t want to offend anybody.
“There are certain responsibilities that go with communication, that you’ve got to embrace. Those responsibilities change, and I think that I’m across all of that. I watch, I think, as much football as anybody.”
Having worked for ITV, the majority of Tyldesley’s exposure to a UK audience has been in the Champions League, where he has voiced some of the greatest moments in European football history, perhaps most memorably Manchester United’s famous comeback against Bayern Munich in the 1999 final, one of more than 40 European Cup finals he has worked on.
He was replaced as ITV’s lead commentator by Sam Matterface (“I think he’s a good commentator,” Tyldesley is quick to note) in 2020, but continued to work for the company until Euro 2024, where Germany vs Denmark was his last game.
“It is a little disconcerting that these Premier League games that I do for Amazon Prime are the only Premier League games I’ve ever done on [live UK] television.
“My dear old Mum died earlier this year, and she used to say, ‘Why are you not on anymore?’ and I would say ‘I am actually Mum you just can’t access me any more!'”
A Clive double
Tele addicts looking for post-Christmas entertainment will have a choice on Friday 27 December: Clive Tyldesley or Clive Tyldesley.
On BBC Two, Tyldesley can be seen in bright blue Christmas jumper representing Nottingham on a Christmas special of University Challenge up against Leeds Trinity. That is an 8.30pm start, but he will have been on duty for an hour already by then, commentating live for Amazon Prime Video at the Amex Stadium alongside his most famous partner-in-crime Andy Townsend.
There is a kind of irony that it will be Brighton and Brentford, both clubs owned by men who made their fortune in sports gambling, will be the teams for Tyldesley’s farewell, given his stance on betting in football and work with the campaign group Gambling with Lives.
But Tyldesley does not want to insert himself into the story. The words of his great mentor Reg Gutteridge, the long-time boxing commentator for ITV who died in 2009, still ring in his ears.
“He taught me 95% of what I know about communication, let alone sports commentary. Reg would say to me that a goal is unique and it deserves its own soundtrack,” Tyldesley says from his home near Reading.
“So the ‘incredible, amazing, fantastic’ is not enough for a very singular, unique, memorable goal. You’ve got to come up with something which is peculiar and distinctive and belongs to that moment, and people with memories of that moment, which is quite a challenge in an unscripted area.
“I commentate differently to Peter Drury, but what I really like is how hard he tries to use the language. He uses it in a different way to me, but I really respect the fact that he tries to find words which are different from all the other words.”
Both Drury and Tyldesley are voices that resonate with English football fans of almost any age.
Tyldesley adds: “The most lovely thing is when people say, Oh, when that goal was scored, I’ll never forget what you said’, those Champions League finals and things, or Rooney ‘remember the name’. It’s lovely when people say that. It is the biggest compliment, and that’s the one that makes you blush.
“But I couldn’t have said them, unless Sheringham and Solskjaer stuck the damn things in the net, unless Gerrard had headed it in the net, unless Rooney had scored. They’re the performers. My job, my challenge, is just to try to provide a soundtrack fitting of these extraordinary moments of sporting theatre that these wondrous athletes produced for us and become almost timeline moments in our lives, of where we were, who we were with, what we did.”
He is clearly still a romantic about football, willing to make the kinds of sacrifices he has made all his career: Tyldesley will spend Christmas night in a hotel room in Manchester ahead of Man City vs Everton on Boxing Day, his penultimate appointment for Amazon, and the reverse of a fixture he did a day later in 2023.
Not that he is keeping track, he assures me.
“I don’t want to turn this into the Clive Tyldesley world tour,” he says, hoping to avoid any sort of farewell tribute. “Motty [John Motson, former BBC commentator] was always very good at suddenly discovering this was the 1,000th game that he’d ever commentated on or something.
“I think the perfect way to end something is just as if it’s not the end, really, and tomorrow, somebody else will be doing this job, and that’s fine.”
The dying art of professional commentary?
Tyldesley clearly still cares about the game and the way it is presented. In an hour-long conversation, we forensically dissect the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards, the changing nature sports writing and the pressures on journalism (“football commentary *is* a piece of journalism”) as a whole. Even in football commentary, there is an almost universal need for its exponents to do more and faster.
“I do try to drive a message of trying to keep up the standards because there are so many thousands of people that want to do what we’re doing,” he says.
“We owe it to the opportunity that we’ve been given to make this rather bizarre and stupid way of making a living as good as it can possibly be, and to give it some thought, attention and time.”
Although Manchester City on Thursday and Brighton on Friday may sound the like dream, Tyldesley would rather not be cramming two games into two days, although acknowledges that the younger breed of commentator cannot afford to turn down work or opportunity.
“I speak to young commentators who get no feedback. It’s just another game. On to the next match. ‘Where are you tomorrow?’ is something you hear in press rooms.
“You should be at home getting ready for the next game!
“We’re lucky with these Prime games that most of the people that are working with the producers, the editors, the commissioners at Sunset and Vine, do want to capture the story. And they do put out presenters and pundits for each game, studios and pitchside at each match.
“I’ve been feel really privileged to have worked on these Premier League games the last four years that they’ve had them, because I think they do it properly.
“Maybe it’s just fanciful for me to think that other broadcasters who are churning out material on an almost hourly basis have got the time and the opportunity to do the same.”
Tyldesley remains as self-critical as he is of the wider trends. He has listened back both Leicester vs West Ham and Newcastle vs Liverpool, his two Amazon games earlier this month, not to assess the game but analyse his own performance.
“I think I was a bit rusty the first night at Leicester. I was really poor on the El Khannouss goal – well maybe I wasn’t poor – I wasn’t sure who’d scored it, so I waited. It wasn’t one of those Rooney or Shearer moments where I shouted out the name as it went in,” Tyldesley says.
“In a way, it’s good commentary: if you’re not sure, don’t go. Wait. But I was angry with myself afterwards that in the moment I didn’t nail it.”
Nearly half a century in, and Tyldesley is still honing his craft.
