Just two weeks before BBC Sport announced the loss of 36 jobs, there was news at Talksport that may prove just as seismic for the evolving broadcast landscape.

A new role, that of sports rights manager, was confirmed last month before it was revealed that live radio coverage of this winter’s England cricket tour of South Africa had also been secured by the self-styled “home of live sport and even livelier opinion”.

Telegraph Sport can now also disclose that Talksport will explore bids to break BBC Radio’s monopoly on live Formula One, which dates back to 1994, and home cricket coverage of England that has remained the sole preserve of Test Match Special since 1957.

For a station historically so synonymous with football, the move towards wider audiences is accelerating just as 5 Live has announced a reduction in its commissioning as part of a wider £500m programme of BBC savings.

Liam Fisher, who has gone from producer to editor to director to now head of Talksport, says this is also the continuation of a strategy that saw almost 500 live football commentaries last season (including the World Cup) augmented by the rights to a host of other major events.

In recent years, these have also included the British and Irish Lions rugby union series in South Africa, the Olympics, various England cricket away series, the Open and Ryder Cup golf, the Commonwealth Games, World Championship boxing and darts, major rugby league finals, as well as regular horse racing, MotoGP and NFL.

“Football still is our bread and butter... but we’ve definitely looked to extend it on the basic understanding that, even if football is your first, second and third sport, you are probably into something else as well,” Fisher tells Telegraph Sport.

“So our strategy has been to pick off the events where we believe there is an audience potential that sits well with what we’re providing... we’ll cherry pick what we think are the key sports and events that we think you might be interested in.”

Fisher describes the appointment of Jon Norman as the new sports rights manager as “a pivotal moment” in Talksport’s live sport focus and he is open about the potential targets.

Of Formula 1, which has had an exclusive deal with BBC Radio for 32 years, Fisher says: “It’s another brilliant set of rights. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t actively exploring whether there’s an opportunity. We think the audience goes quite well with the Talksport audience. We think there’s an opportunity for us to deliver really good amplification for it as well.”

On cricket, for which the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has indicated a willingness to have multiple radio broadcasters for home series from 2029 (as they do in Australia), he says: “It’s something which we’ve been really keen on getting involved in more. Our tactic has been to just pick off some of the away series.

“I love cricket. We’d certainly love to do more in that space. And we believe, fundamentally, just as the Premier League [in football] have worked to have a couple of incumbents, it would work to the benefit of other organisations as well.

“I think there is room to have two [audio] broadcasters delivering those rights. You’re maximising probably the audience, you’re maximising the money you’re going to receive. And, ultimately, if what is being said about the BBC is to be believed, you are protecting; making sure that there is an audio platform willing to take the rights before the BBC potentially comes to you and says, ‘Look, we just can’t offer what we have historically’.

“I just think it makes good business sense from their point of view to have that, depending on where the BBC sort of ends up over the next couple of years.

“From the BBC’s point of view I would say they’ll always back themselves. Test Match Special has had a 60-plus years head start on whatever we do for home cricket. So they will always say, ‘Look, we back the product that we have delivered really, really successfully for many, many years’.”

And what can Talksport offer that is different? “To your sponsors, particularly with someone like the ECB, we can amplify your sponsors and give them more coverage than they’re likely to get in certain other places.

“Secondly it’s that ‘always on’ aspect. From a BBC 5 Live point of view, [in F1] they’re mainly going to be around the races, the qualifying. They’re not going to give you loads of coverage into the Breakfast Show all week. Obviously what we would look to do is a proper 360 [-degree coverage]... also outside of the race weekends and season. We can turn up the noise on your sport at other times of the day, in other parts of the year as well.”

On the subject of “noise”, Fisher stresses that Talksport’s cricket coverage would build on a bespoke approach for away series.

“When we initially got them [in 2018] there was a lot of noise about, ‘Oh my god, they’re going to ruin it with adverts, it’s going to be a lot of shouting, there’s going to be people running into bowl and we’re going to be getting odds from Paddy Power on whether Stuart Broad’s going to take a wicket’,” he recalls.

“And we said, ‘Look, we’re not going to do any of that’. There were no ads during play at all. We just said, ‘No, we’re going to offer it completely clean’. We’ll deliver something that doesn’t feel a million miles away from what they’re used to, albeit with perhaps some updated voices and other people who are very good at what they do.

“I think, grudgingly, the vast majority of people went, ‘Actually, it’s pretty good, we’re quite enjoying it. And they’re not doing what we thought they might do’. It would be the same thing if ever we were to get the chance with the home cricket. We’d think to do it in a very kind of... not necessarily commercially sanitised way... but really understanding that audience.”

That would also mean staying true to a broadcasting style that has placed a certain clear water between itself and its rivals with its more unfiltered and irreverent tone. “Blokey” is one common description.

It is undoubtedly also popular. Indeed, it was announced last month that the Talksport Breakfast show – generally helmed by Jeff Stelling, Alan Brazil and Ally McCoist – has surpassed 5 Live for morning listeners (1.4 million to 1.3 million for the latest quarter). Simon Jordan’s opinionated late morning slot with Jim White has helped to vastly grow its reach across social media platforms – notably a 76 per cent YouTube increase in 12 months – on top of the 3.6 million weekly audio viewers (which compares to 5 Live’s 5.4 million across their entire breadth of programming).

Fisher says that age is irrelevant to whether you might appear as a pundit, citing the late Jeffrey Archer.

“I’ll just take everybody on their merit,” he says. “I’m always very mindful of the makeup of the station and making sure we’ve got a range of voices. You want to feel current and up to date. At the same time, you’ve got people who have got amazing broadcasting credentials and great experience.

“I do think sometimes there is a sense of… ‘They’ve still got a lot to offer’. Jeffrey Archer was a tremendous speaker, he used to come on as a guest to speak about cricket. He was 86 years old but you go, ‘Does it really matter?’ I’d rather have someone who is very good at what they do rather than somebody who’s 30, looks the part, if they don’t know what the 80-year-old knows, and the 80-year-old is great value with great stories and great experience and keeps in touch with everything that’s going on. Ultimately, I think people come to Talksport because they want a release. Life is quite tough at the moment.”

So what does he look for in a pundit?

“You’ve got to be authentic. You’ve got to believe what you say. You’re not just trying to make the phones ring. You’ve got a short shelf life with that because you can’t keep doing it day after day. You want opinion, but genuine opinion.

“And use your own experience. What was it like for you? I’ll always be thinking, ‘What does this person provide that we don’t currently have?’ Probably one of our most famous guys is Simon Jordan. He offers an insight you don’t often get in the media from the owner-executive point of view.”

Jordan, he says, thinks carefully about the often polarising positions he takes.

“I have conversations with him where he goes, ‘Did I go too far with this particular story?’ So it’s not as if he’s just shooting his mouth off and going, ‘I don’t really care’. He will believe in the things he says, he’s very well-informed. He’s not going into a situation to talk about Spurs or Chelsea or the Premier League without actually having had a couple of calls from people.

“So sometimes he gives the impression as if he’s just been asked something and just ruminates an opinion straight away. But he will roughly know where his angle of attack is. He is opinionated but, to my mind, he always backs it up and it’s that classic phrase that people always say, ‘I don’t always agree with you, but you’re very entertaining and you’re making some good points’.”

On the subject of controversial pundits, Fisher also says that he took soundings from some trusted colleagues about recently bringing back Andy Gray for his first live commentary stint in Britain since 2014, having infamously lost his job at Sky Sports for sexist off-air remarks.

Fisher says that he is still among the “elite” co-commentators and the 70-year-old will be back on Talksport in the coming weeks.

“It’s great to have him involved; we’re just going to use him for some key matches,” he says. “It’s trying to get the right level that appeals to him. He was great, brilliant to work with, absolutely fantastic, proper professional; ringing up beforehand, ‘What do you need?’ Ringing afterwards, ‘Was that okay?’ A person who takes real pride in their work does that.”