The Beef: James Fielden
An interview with a professional football commentator
For a lot of young football supporters who dream of playing professionally but don’t have the talent, working in the game in some form or fashion is a perfectly desirable consolation prize.
The people who do find their way into the football industry are there because of their determination and ability. Some are working jobs that look glamorous from the outside and come with a modest degree of renown, others simply making their way in the workforce because there are bills to pay.
Regardless, it makes sense to me that working in football is preferable to doing the same job somewhere else. I know from my own experience that a football brief is immensely more enjoyable than the very same task in a different realm. Give me football any time.
But there are football careers that aren’t replicable elsewhere, at least not beyond sport as a whole. Playing and coaching fit that bill. To me, one of the most intriguing of all is football commentary.
Success in commentary requires serious graft, a deep understanding of football and its culture, and a natural aptitude for the spoken word. It puts a person into a situation I can’t handle myself: speaking in public and knowing there are people actually listening.
I wanted to talk to a commentator to find out what it takes to deliver a match into a microphone and embrace the enormous positives of a football life on the air.
So I did.
The Beef: James Fielden
If you watch football with any kind of regularity, you know the voice of James Fielden. As well as frequent match commentaries on the world feed, his credits include Match of the Day, talkSPORT, TNT Sports and Sky Sports+ as well as various apps and players that form part of the infrastructure of streaming.
It’s clear from both his commentaries and our conversation that Fielden is a steadfastly conscientious professional, studious in all the ways it benefits his audience but aware that the commentator’s role is to facilitate and illuminate, not to dominate.
We started at the beginning. Whenever I speak to someone whose path includes several stops on Match of the Day, I’m going to want to know where that journey could possibly have originated.
“There is no one route and the thing I love actually about meeting new people who do this job or kind of strands of this job, whether you're a reporter or commentator or whatever you might be, is everyone seems to have had a different way into this situation,” Fielden tells me.
“There’s no perfect way and there’s no direct way.”
I’d wager his particular route is among the more unusual. Relatively fresh out of university, Fielden applied for a different role entirely at what was then Perform Group. He didn’t hear back and when he followed up, the job had been filled. But when one door closes, another might open.
“They wanted to know if I fancied doing commentary. I’d never done it before but obviously I’d love to give it a go. They said, ‘Right, come down to London for this training day and we’ll take it from there.’ There were probably about ten or fifteen of us at this training day and they gave us half an hour to research a game and we had to do an hour or a half of commentary.
“Eventually they said there were two jobs and they were given to other people but they were willing to give me enough games to make it work as a freelancer. And that was it.”
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Fielden cut his teeth on the tiny screens of the betting companies, whose match coverage was provided by Perform. He commentated on the weird and the wonderful. The football world was his oyster and Perform’s multitude of contracts were his proving ground.
“We used to commentate on all the matches that didn’t have a rights deal in England,” he says. “So I did Belgium and the Netherlands, and second tiers of France and Italy. I used to do Japan, China, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador – all of the South American countries but Brazil, at all times of the day and night.
“I used to love covering South American football because it was just frantic. The atmosphere looked amazing. It was gritty, just old traditional football and you know the fans appreciated it for what it was. I used to love it.”
“I did the Men’s Under-17s in Indonesia and the Women’s Under-20s in Colombia. It’s amazing because these youth tournaments are in countries I’d just never go to otherwise.”
talkSPORT followed. Unlike many football commentators, Fielden’s beginnings were in television-style coverage. Where local radio and hospital radio might be the more typical path, radio commentary presented the opposite challenge.
“Whenever I do radio commentary, I feel like I have to up my game in terms of speaking more, whereas a lot of people go the other way. So they have to take words out. I think I’d find it easier this way than the other because you’d always have to self-edit while trying to call a game.”
It’s always been my assumption that these nuances, along with the need to be brave enough to talk to thousands of unseen ears in the first place, would be the most daunting challenges for a commentator. Not so, says Fielden.
“The big challenges are trying to get information that people don’t want to give you. Say I’m doing lower league games, I think managers at lower levels, although they can be more approachable, at the same time can be more guarded.
“At Premier League level, every single press conference is basically a journalist trying to get information out of people that they don’t want to give, right?
“If I want to get injury news, it can be difficult. Even some press officers are quite guarded about it and I get that because why would you want to give your opposition any kind of help or a head start? Whereas, from my point of view, my commentary benefits from me having specific information.”
Most of what I think I know about football commentators is rooted in assumption. I assumed, for example, that Martin Tyler and Adam Summerton and Jacqui Oatley and Peter Drury and and Vicki Sparks and Sam Matterface and Conor McNamara and James Fielden spend their days gossiping in some mammoth WhatsApp group.
“There officially isn’t one unless I’ve just not had the invite!” says Fielden to correct my misunderstanding.
“I'm sure there are plenty of unofficial ones with groups of commentators who are friends. I'm in a couple of them and sometimes they're a great resource because you kind of sound each other out about certain things, or maybe you're doing a team for the first time.”
“We get given a lot of stat packs which can be something like 40 pages for any given game. They identify a lot of the themes and trends.”
A topic that often comes up when football supporters talk about commentators is how the play-by-play commentator and their right-hand expert summarisers balance the need to call the game and the growing demand for – and understanding of – discussion of football’s tactical machinations.
Is it the job of the commentator, co-commentator or neither to process what’s happening from a tactical point of view? Is that even something that needs to happen live, or is it a post-match task to be undertaken at greater remove?
“I think if you can really pinpoint something then sure, but commentators and co-comms are watching in real-time and it’s tough to expect them to nail it live,” muses Fielden.
“Something like Monday Night Football, where you’ve got Jamie Carragher dissecting someone’s formation because they’ve got the benefit of watching the tactical camera, the wide lens that focuses on the whole pitch, that’s different to me expecting a pundit alongside me to be able to pull it apart in real-time. So if they can’t spot it, I’m not going to expect myself to spot it.
“From my point of view the preparation is more about the basics, getting people’s names straight, and maybe trying to just add a little extra on top.”
Our conversation moves towards a divergence in the style and flavour of live football coverage. The demand for tactical analysis and data is now well established and the need to meet that demand in the moment is, inevitably, generating innovation.
“It’s more prevalent now. I know the Premier League and Bundesliga at least, they have a normal commentary for the world feed for people watching abroad but there’s now a tactical feed as well.
“All the data stuff’s updated and they can put fancy graphics on the match footage and the L-shape like you get on Sky Sports News.”
That dealt with, I can no longer resist the prompt with which the tiny, excitable football fan voice in my head had been tap-tap-tapping me to ask since we sat down. Fielden is now a Match of the Day commentator. Amazing.
“I was doing an FA Cup game,” he tells me. “I think it was Cheltenham against Mansfield, and the boss at the BBC ended up hearing it because it turned out to be a decent game and they turned it into mini-highlights. So I spoke to him and it kind of began there.
“I’m not a Match of the Day regular. It’s categorically the biggest thing I’ve ever had and not the easiest. You get thrust into a massive game but you’re immersed in the Premier League so you’re not even having to look down at your notes a lot of the time, you just know who the players are. So I felt a bit more relaxed doing that the first time than you might expect.”
Being appointed to a match for Match of the Day isn’t just a shift from radio to television or from the EFL to the Premier League, but to a Saturday afternoon that demands a different dimension from the voice on the gantry.
Fielden and his colleagues around the country usually have to commentate on their assigned match and then haul ass down to the tunnel to conduct post-match interviews with the managers.
It’s a physical feat, certainly, but it’s also just not commentary. How has Fielden taken to that added string to his bow?
“I’ve really enjoyed doing it but it’s a totally different skill set to commentary and I’ve learned some pretty fast lessons over the years.
“While he was at Swansea, Graham Potter took exception to me stating two penalties against his team looked nailed on. It was a quick lesson in how phrasing a question is everything and to leave your own opinion out. You just want to give them the platform to express themselves how they wish.
“You spend 90 minutes doing what could be quite a pulsating commentary and concentration-wise you’re really locked into it. Then suddenly you’re walking down from the gantry to get to the tunnel and having to formulate in your mind what just happened and what you need to ask no matter what.
“You also need to think about the structure of the interview. You probably don’t go all guns blazing with your first question about what might have been a controversial incident. You’ll leave that until later on.
“There’s also a chance to listen to a manager doing their other interviews first with other broadcasters so you have a chance to develop a theme from something they’ve already said. It can just be a case of thinking on your feet and reacting to what gets said back to you.”
Have you cracked it? Is it even crackable?
“I’m still learning about the best way to do it,” he says. “Every interviewee is different, especially those whose English might not be the best. Then there’s definitely a need to simplify your language instead of using any colloquialisms.”
Ultimately those questions after the fact are but a sliver of the role of the football commentator. Fielden is a genuine lover of football and a very fine commentator who knows his stuff about both the game and his profession.
It’s no surprise he’s moving up in the world and there will undoubtedly be more Match of the Day briefs in the future. Talking people through the game in a way that adds rather than takes away, that illuminates rather than dominates, is a learned skill that is much more difficult than it sounds.
And that, really, is kind of the point.