Taylor began his career at the Newark Advertiser and was a freelance journalist in Leicester and Manchester before joining The Guardian. Originally from Nottinghamshire, he is based in Manchester and London.
He also won the Sports Journalists' Association football writer of the year in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, as well as the 2016 scoop of the year prize for his investigation into the abuse scandal and the 2017 sports writer of the year award. The London Press Club also honoured him in 2017 with its scoop of the year award and there have been further honours from the British Journalism Awards and the Foreign Press Association, which named him both sports journalist and news journalist of the year. In 2019 he won The Press Awards sports journalist of the year for a second time.
Taylor has also been commended for his exposure of a cover-up within the Football Association (FA) after the England women's footballer Eniola Aluko made complaints about alleged racial discrimination from the manager Mark Sampson. The FA subsequently apologised to Aluko after the investigation led to a parliamentary hearing. A new FA-commissioned inquiry upheld Aluko's allegations.
In October 2019, Taylor joined The Athletic.[2] He was named feature writer of the year at the Sports Journalists' Association awards in 2022 and also become the first two-time winner of the North West Football Awards journalist of the year.