Radio industry

The BBC favourite's longevity has elevated him to a position where his ability no longer matters

English football has always had a sense of itself as something noisy and unbound, a business above all of sounds and textures. With this in mind it is not surprising that in England we revere to an usual degree the role of the commentator, the man whose job it is to shout over the top of football in tones of dismay and celebration.

This week the BBC has been celebrating 40 years of John Motson. I'm not here to assault the legacy of Motson, who is a passionate broadcaster and a likable figure, despite the lurking suspicion that football commentary, like being a drivetime DJ on regional radio, is one of those surprisingly cut-throat careers, all trapped ambition, Partridge-esque egomania explosions and lapel-grappling face-offs against the canteen toilet sinks. In any case the BBC is clearly convinced Motson is the greatest TV football commentator of all time – and it would be pointless to argue, no matter that he may appear at times not the greatest, nor particularly good at all. It is perhaps better simply to look at how this came to be, and to offer a brief guide to becoming the greatest football commentator of all time.

1. Be historically vital. If you weren't watching football on TV in the 1980s it is perhaps impossible to grasp the importance of the power struggle between Motson and Barry Davies for primacy at the BBC mic. This was one of those ideologically fraught cold war-era oppositions, Motson the populist squawker versus the tetchy, professorial Davies, who approached football in the tones of a perpetually disappointed carved wooden woodpecker. Despite being a superior wordsmith, more singular, more captivatingly appalled, there was always a sense this was a battle Davies could never win (incidentally a 40-year Barry Davis retrospective really would be interesting, very interesting – just look at his face). Instead the BBC continues to be obsessed with Motson. Davies will go mad. And he has every right to go mad.

Change came with deregulation. The moment Sky's tanks came swarming across the barricades tossing flowers to the crowds and ramping up their multi-game battery-farmed gantry empire, it simply stopped mattering who did this stuff. The sense of shared mono-vision experience had gone forever and with it went the era of the giants, the grand woollen-mufflered sphinxes. The reliably good Guy Mowbray once told me he sometimes commentates by accident while watching football as a fan, blurting out things like "problems there" or "quick feet from the pint-sized Paraguayan" to bemused glances from those around him. There is eccentricity potential here, a sense of vibrant inner commentator. But we simply will never get to know Mowbray like we knew Motson. John Updike wrote that your old friends aren't necessarily the people you like best, they're the people who got there first. And so it is with Motson. He got there first. He harvested those big, shared moments, his own analogue-era land-grab. This is how he first became the greatest.

2. Don't be too knowing. The decline in football commentary has its roots in a loss of innocence. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face and so it has proved for Motson who underwent a basic restyling about 15 years ago, emerging blinking from his broom cupboard as a kind of BBC-sponsored heritage exhibit, a self-propelling caricature burping out a mini-industry of Motson books, Motson DVDs, Motson intimate sanitary products. And so John Motson became "John Motson", an entertainment product with a shtick to peddle. For Motson there was something transgressive in this, a sense of losing touch with the sound that first made him a hit. At his best Motson roars and says things like "aooohaa!" and "ahhoorgh!" – as in "Anelka … Ahhoorgh!". These are his noises, and they are excellent noises. But Motson became self-aware. He bowed to the pressure to produce instead the "line" that captures a moment. Motson claims not to have prepared "the crazy gang have beaten the culture club", a wretched concoction blurted out as Wimbledon beat Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final. I believe him, partly because it makes no sense at all and partly because there is something agreeable in the suggestion of a subliminal Motson fixation with geisha-styled transvestite new romantic reggae-pop acts ("quite remarkable – from the outside a lovely lady, but underneath, very much all man). Later Motson invented the idea of blurting out a pointless and distracting fact when a player has just scored ("that's the 14th occasion on this ground a first-half headed goal has …") a bit like the person who shouts exciteably when numbers emerge on the national lottery as though No43 is an entity with hopes and fears, a plastic ball desperate to do a job in the ball funnel, rather than part of a meaningless abstract sequence. Motson had no such filter in the early days. He simply raged and riffed, untarnished by the stain of "John Motson". This was how he grew into being the greatest.

3. Be dead

The best commentators are all dead. This isn't a matter of declining standards. It is simply because dead men offering their views on football seems somehow more gripping, their opinions hardened by the unarguable gravity, the sheer machismo of death. The earliest TV commentators would often say hardly anything at all (One of Brazil's World Cup goals in 1950 is accompanied by "yes … yes … yes … Yes.") but what opinion is offered still seems somehow austere and iron-clad because they are all dead now – just as the recorded joy of dead men seems more plausible, their jokes more hilarious. I refuse to use Google to confirm my strong suspicions that Kenneth Wolstenholme is dead simply because to discover he was alive and living in a village in Kent – opening fetes, reading the Daily Telegraph – would hugely tarnish the sheer unfeigned joy of hearing him say once again "Djalma Santos – what a master footballer this man is!" The dead have an unvarnished authority. Motson's own death, many years from now, will be a final coronation. Struck down, he will become more powerful than we can possibly imagine. And frankly, there really isn't time now for anyone else to catch up, overhaul him and then die first. This is why he will remain greatest.

4. Take us on a journey. The sense of haring along together into some untamed football future is essential to the peak commentating experience. The pre-modern commentator has a natural advantage here in that his commentary was often literally a journey. Posted overseas among medieval stands, candle-lit pylons and writhing mustachioed hordes, a quiet heroism seemed to emerge down the crackling phone line. The commentary on Brazil's 5-1 disembowelling of Alf Ramsey's World Cup hopefuls at the Maracanã in 1964 had a weary, confiding honesty to it, like a president loosening his tie and with kindly smile delivering a strangely personal final message of mutual assured destruction.

The journey is still possible. In the Sky dawn Martin Tyler and Andy Gray seemed to be taking us into something new, shouting their giddy-ups and cracking their whips and colonising whole new realms of boom-time football. But it is a less satisfying journey. The football world is smaller. We don't need a frontiersman. We feel at home in these stadiums. We know the players' names. The commentator is now simply a garnish to our own wised-up widescreen experience. Motson was there in the day and retains a tremble of ancient relevance. This is why he remains the greatest but, after 40 years, something of a full stop on all this, that grand pioneering template not so much outflanked as suddenly diffuse and oddly irrelevant, scattered in the shadow of its own monolith.