John Dykes, a sports television anchor, commentator, and journalist based in Singapore, chats with Manifest to give us a lowdown on his career, what he believes is wrong in the broadcast space currently, political and broadcast driven-agendas, and more...

Edited excerpts:

You were born and brought up in the United Kingdom. How did the shift from the UK to Asia happen?

When I was 17, I went to Hong Kong with my family because my father had a job there. I ended up doing a year of school in the country and I loved it. Even though I went back to England for university, I wanted to get back to Hong Kong. 
    
I started my career in Hong Kong and when I was young I certainly didn’t know I wanted to be on television. I loved sport, played a lot of it, and followed it avidly. I was gifted when it came to English and stringing words together. I stumbled into doing some college radio and thought maybe I could do something in the media space. Then, I started working with a newspaper, where I was a junior reporter/writer. I wrote about sports among other topics. I learned the ropes there and after this, I drifted more towards entertainment work. 
    
The first time a TV company came to me, I turned them down. I thought it was cheesy, and couldn’t see myself being on screen. I was more inclined towards writing. But then they persuaded me and I ended up doing a movie review show on a channel in Hong Kong. I interviewed stars and also covered the Oscars. 
    
Sport always lured me in though. When I left my day job at the newspaper, I went and joined an agency that had rights to football, golf, and basketball around Asia and created content around them. I learned my ropes as a producer first and it made more sense for me to go on screen as a sports guy as compared to a movie guy. I started doing commentary for what was Star Sports back then and that turned into me presenting sport.  

Which was the first sport you worked on?
It was football and in particular the Chinese Super League. But because I was always a cricket expert, Star Sports asked me if I could help produce and present a cricket show – Inside Cricket which was aired twice a week. I would effectively write, produce, and host it. 
    
Very quickly, Star used me for other sports as well. When I moved to Singapore in 1997, Star merged with ESPN and became ESPN Star, and my career took off. I was the only presenter and covered every sport under the sun including cricket, F1, and the MotoGP. I covered the 1999 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup on site in the United Kingdom, Australia’s tours of India, and tri-series ODIs in Sharjah.
    
But then came the change when ESPN Star got the television rights for the Premier League in Asia in the early 2000s. They rolled out Asia-wide Premier League coverage across 26 countries to start with. Since I was the English guy who knew my football, I became the face of it exclusively. 

You’ve hosted almost every major sports broadcast in South Asia - cricket, football, F1, and tennis. Which one did you enjoy hosting the most?

I love cricket. It was my first love as a kid. I played a little bit of league cricket in Hong Kong. Cricket gave me a chance to sit in a studio with the likes of Sunil Gavaskar, and Geoffrey Boycott – who were legends. I remember covering one of Australia’s tours to India and I interviewed Darren Lehmann and some other players. I walked into the coffee shop of the hotel and was seated alone. I was this junior presenter then and there was a table that had Ian Chappell, David Hookes, Jeff Thompson, and Jim Maxwell, the great Australian broadcaster. They were so nice and invited me to their table and I had the most amazing lunch with these great legends. 
    
Football was always a natural fit for me. As an Englishman, you always grow up with football. I wasn’t much of a player, but I understood the game. Like my cricket experience, sitting in a studio with legends like Bryan Robson, Ian Rush, and Bobby Robson was just amazing. 

We don’t see this trend now though - and it’s more of specialist presenters. Why do you think so?

Yes, it’s very rare for that not to happen now. Occasionally you get a football specialist called to host a multi-sport event like the Olympics.

I think it’s inevitable because of the level of sophistication of coverage. Different sports now mean you need different people, especially the experts.   

I would take a little bit of an issue with this though. It’s a pity that I don’t do cricket anymore because I’ve felt that I could bring a level of knowledge and a different skill set as a presenter. As a presenter, the prime requisite is that you should be really good at knowing your stuff and organically work with your guests, with the vision the producer of the show has. 

I would love to bring my English Premier League-style presentation and narrative to cricket, especially now that cricket is so different from what it was when I presented it. We didn’t have T20s or franchise cricket and when I see the coverage now, part of me thinks that it could do with something a little bit different.

There’s an emphasis on bringing glamour to the floor which is fine, but I’d like to see a real slick proposal around it as well.

Do you think the ESPN Star deal which brought football to South Asia, made it big in the region?

Yes. Football always had a following in South East Asia and North Asia. We revolutionised the coverage. When I first moved to HK, we saw one live game a week and a weekly highlights show. Then, suddenly we had a comprehensive list of programming which included ‘Here We Go’ – a Friday night football show, along with very very comprehensive coverage across the weekend and the Tuesday night Football Focus.
    
What I found was that all of this helped football in India take off. I had already covered some football in India – I was blessed to work with Novy Kapadia on the Mohun Bagan-East Bengal derby. But football was positioned as a Kolkata, Goa sport and not widely popular. 
    
I took issue with that and noticed that once we started covering the Premier League in particular, through our feedback we were getting football-literate comments and questions from Mumbai, Delhi, and other parts of India. I knew there was a young, knowledgeable Indian audience out there.

When it comes to viewership and sponsor numbers, football is still far away from cricket. But you mention there are young, knowledgeable fans out there. So why’s the gap not closing?

This is interesting. Sometimes we had to argue with our bosses because the money people in the company would put down a six-hour cut down of a day-old ODI versus a live football game. We would get anguish coming from fans through feedback. They wanted a live football game and thought they were getting patronised. I was aware of the audience being there. 
    
I don’t like the idea of pitting football against cricket – I think there’s room for both. In terms of the mechanics of getting advertising revenue in – it was easier for them to sell cricket, even a six-hour cut down of it, versus getting a sponsor for live football. 

That wasn’t a manipulative move, but that’s what happened and money called the shots then as it does now. If you look at the American sports model – they have the big four football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. That was largely due to broadcasters manipulating market forces. They knew that those big sports in conjunction with the broadcasters wanted to suppress anything else because they were milking it. 
    
The more I look at the dynamic involving cricket (in India) the same organisations and broadcasters own it all now. So it comes down to where they see the value. If football through Indian Super League (ISL) started making waves, then did that suddenly mean, there’s some impact on cricket? I’m not sure about that but to be  100% guaranteed that cricket maintained its pre-eminence with the Indian Premier League (IPL) and everything else that goes with it, as a result, cricket has jumped out again in front.

For India specifically - a lot of us remember you, Shebby Singh and Paul Masefield, Steve McMahon, and Gerry Armstrong among others who would join in for Football Focus, a one-hour serious show about the sport. Why do we not see shows like that anymore? Even if you see the international broadcast now for the Premier League, there’s no show with the gravitas of Football Focus...

We have to unpack it in a couple of ways. Initially, Football Focus was launched when we had the rights to broadcast the Premier League in all those markets across Asia Pacific. Within three years, the end of the first broadcast rights cycle, we grew so popular in these territories that cable operators and other entities were picking up the rights from the Premier League itself. 

That left us with a bit of a problem. Previously, Football Focus had footage from the games. Suddenly, that wasn’t possible. So we had to drop all footage and go with a chat-based format – me plus four other guests. We got a lot of audience feedback. It was need-based but a blessing in disguise. This gave us time to just talk and that’s something missing right now from the broadcast space.
    
I get so many people talking about Football Focus and you mentioned ‘gravitas’ and that came from an interesting blend of guests. We had Steve McMahon who played at the highest level with Liverpool, Gerry Armstrong who was a World Cup goal scorer, and we found Paul Masefield who was based in Singapore and was a lower league pro in England before that. Shebby Singh was an amazing find. He was ethnically Indian, played for Malaysia, and had wild theories and ideas. We also had Jamie Reeves who was an ex-amateur footballer who was an economics lecturer. He was articulate. We had a great blend of speakers and was in many ways a precursor to the podcast format because it was people just talking. 
    
Any sports broadcast has to have credibility, glamour, and gravitas as you say. I’m not being an old fart, but the minute you sit in a pub or park or talk to just anybody, you have to ask the question: does the world want to hear an unknown Manchester United fan? 
    
Perhaps, because nowadays there’s a place for everything but what I found was that we found a lovely blend between being accessible and having the expertise and knowing our stuff. We tried not to be too preachy or condescending but wanted to be as genuine as we could. If two of the panelists got into an argument, my producer would be in my ear saying ‘let it run, I don’t care about the commercial break, we’ll make up the time’. 

What we have seen now – and I’m not going all ‘Joey Barton’ but I would say is that to a certain extent, broadcasters and leagues sometimes feel like they have to represent corporate culture. In going down the route of being diverse, equitable, and accessible, I’m not in any way saying we shouldn’t have women or anyone else as experts, but sometimes what happens is that the entertainment and enlightenment go away. It’s okay to do that in the boardroom but we’re getting into a mess because we’re not picking the best people to go on-air. 

Do you think this has anything to do with the growth of social media? Have influencers emerged as ‘competitors’ to classic hosts like you? While sports fans like myself had the appetite for the one-hour-long Football Focus, do you think the newer fans can only consume short-form content?

Yes, and there’s no point in being bitter about it because I still have opportunities to work publicly. As a consumer though, I do feel let down by what’s on show.
    
If you look at ‘YouTube or social media celebrities’, like Fabrizio Romano, he saw a need gap on social media for any kind of transfer news. This drives me nuts because at most times it’s bullshit. I’ve never been a fan of doing content around transfers because it’s hugely manipulated by agents, editors, and so many different factors. But the fans don’t care. They want someone to say something about transfers and it’s a little sub-industry. It doesn’t interest me because it’s a million miles away from authentic football conversation as far as I’m concerned. 
    
Content creators like Mark Goldbridge, talk radio, and rabid tabloids in the UK – these are things that I’d distance myself from. I used to love Twitter (now X) because I thought it was a very good source of early gauge of public sentiment. Now it’s completely butchered. 

Talking about X, your following on social media - could be stronger. Is it something you’d want to focus on now, given that’s where the so-called fans and brands are?

It’s something I’ve sort of given up on. A part of that is because I’m not working with a major broadcaster, I don’t have an obligation to be putting up content. I’m closer to 60 than 50 right now, and it’s very difficult for someone my age to become an online personality and build a career around putting up content on social media. 
    
I’ve built 25-30 years of a broadcast portfolio and I’m not sure I’ve got the same energy for the same unless someone tells me I’ll sponsor you to put content.
    
I’m increasingly not bothered about social media other than LinkedIn. That’s also getting diverse, but I still see the focus there for B2B relevance, where people network and share knowledge. I’m not sure what X is right now and I’m distrustful of a lot of what I read there. I keep telling my children and parents-in-law about ‘fake news’ and tell them to keep questioning the content.

So print still holds its own and is the more trusted word?  

I like long-form. I don’t follow the day-to-day coverage because it’s so agenda-driven. I read The Athletic and The Guardian. When you’re a journalist, you’re taught to look for sources and question stuff. I used to do a show with Richard Keys called ‘First Edition’ where we went over the headlines of the newspapers. I loved doing that. Increasingly I found that the remake of it was to read between the lines to figure out whether something was true or not.

This article first appeared in the April print issue of Manifest.