By Dominic Ponsford
The Daily Mail has poached top Telegraph sports writer Paul Hayward
in a summer transfer that will make him one of the best-paid sports
journalists in Fleet Street.
Telegraph insiders believe Hayward has been offered £250,000 a year
and also been given a six-figure golden hello to join Associated
Newspapers.
He declined to comment on the details of the deal but said the salary had been exaggerated.
The
former British Press Awards Sports Writer of the Year leaves The
Telegraph after 13 years and has already given his three months’ notice.
He
said: “It was very hard to leave the Telegraph because the paper’s been
in my blood for such a long time and I do think Martin Newland is going
to be one of the great Telegraph editors.
“But the package the
Mail has put together for me is very enticing, as is the fact that the
main basis of the job is two columns a week. There’s a great tradition
of Daily Mail columnists – people like Jeff Powell and Ian Wooldridge –
and it was a great honour to be asked to continue that tradition.”
In
addition to column writing, Hayward will continue writing about all
major sporting events and estimates that about 50 per cent of his time
will be devoted to covering football.
Hayward started his career
as a trainee on the Racing Post before joining The Independent as a
horse racing writer and then moving to The Daily Telegraph.
He
said: “It’s a very privileged area of our industry because you get to
go to all the major sporting events, things that people would kill to
get tickets for, and you are paid to go there.
“I’m always
conscious of the fact that I am incredibly lucky to do something for a
living that friends of mine are paying vast amounts of money to see.”
Despite two decades in the job, Hayward is still passionate about sport.
He
said: “The key to it all is the live event, the match, the unscripted
drama of a sporting event. Sport is sometimes cynical and corrupt and
sometimes mundane – it’s not great all the time.
“But when you
get those really special moments – and we had one of those this year
with Liverpool winning the European Cup in Istanbul – those are the
moments that anybody would want to witness.”
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