John Doyle (critic)


John Doyle is the television critic with Canada's The Globe and Mail newspaper and an author. Doyle also covers major association football events for the paper. His writing on soccer has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the anthology Best Canadian Sports Writing and for the soccer magazine Eight by Eight.

Early life

He was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary in Ireland. As a child he moved to Dublin before emigrating to Canada in the 1980s.

Career

Doyle was first hired by The Globe and Mail to write for Broadcast Week, the paper's weekly television listings, as a columnist. In 2000, he was appointed the newspaper's daily television critic.
In 2005, Doyle published his first book, the memoir: A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age about his early life in deeply conservative rural Ireland. His book about soccer, The World is a Ball: The Joy, Madness, and Meaning of Soccer was a bestseller on publication in 2010. Doyle has covered multiple World Cup and Euro tournaments and the Women's World Cup.
He has written essays for TV Quarterly and wrote the introduction to the book Rockburn: The CPAC Interviews. He was profiled in the book A Story To Be Told: Personal Reflections on the Irish Emigrant Experience in Canada.
Doyle is known to be a tough but fair critic, and particularly tough on Canadian content. He has been a member of the Television Critics Association since 1996. In 2004 he was involved in a public disagreement with Bill O'Reilly, then of Fox News. O'Reilly complained about Doyle's writing on his TV show. The controversy was the subject if a feature story in the New York Times.