• Fanzine: The story of football’s alternative press By Daniel Gray (Bloomsbury)
Soccer journalism in the UK received a significant and most necessary kick up the rear in the mid-1980s. “While much mainstream football coverage was produced by a narrow cabal of ex-players and cozied-up journalists,” writes Daniel Gray in his latest book, Fanzine, “fanzine contributors reflected a club’s varied supporter base. Articles and cartoons cascaded from the terrace, not the press box. There were no inside scoops or sources; this was outsider information and all the richer for it.”
Gray’s book focuses on a fan-led phenomenon born of frustration. Supporters in the 1970s and 80s were not just treated as an inconvenience, they were blamed for most of the game’s ills. The majority of those who loved the sport were tarred with the same brush as the small but rowdy packs who used soccer as a proving ground for their puny tribal and territorial claims. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who hated the game, once asked a group of soccer journalists if the games could not be played behind closed doors. Those of us who attended games 40 years ago rarely admitted what we did with our spare time. If celebrities and politicians had a favorite team, they kept quiet about it for fear of social ostracization.
The 1980s stadium tragedies in Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough resulted from decades of neglect – most grounds were in serious need of renovation or demolition. Fanzines articulated what anyone visiting British club soccer had known for at least 20 years. We paid cash in exchange for being treated like pariahs, herded by sometimes brutal police forces into unsafe standing pens, then scapegoated when things inevitably turned violent or deadly. It took decades of legal challenges to correct the lies spread about Hillsborough by government, authorities and media, and locate the blame where it truly lay – with police actions that contravened civil rights, and the historical neglect of the game’s complacent, myopic administrators.
Introducing his book in London last week, Gray paid tribute to the progenitors of the fanzine movement, the national magazine When Saturday Comes (WSC). Club fanzines at Bradford City (The City Gent) and York City (Terrace Talk) had already been founded in the early 80s, but the key moment was when WSC started out as a home-stapled, type-written and illegally photo-copied experiment with an initial print run of 100 copies. National daily The Guardian mentioned the mag in its sport section, and printed its address (where the two editors shared a house). Within a week, they’d received 200 letters. “We had no expectation this would amount to something,” editor Andy Lyons tells Gray.
The magazine’s growing reach prompted hundreds of fans to start their own publications, and soon every club in England, Scotland and Wales had their own alternative platform. Some clubs had several. The index of fanzines WSC printed in its back pages soon had to be spread over two issues. Combining sharp humor with ruthless rhetoric, the wave of new publications highlighted problems that a bovine and compliant media had ignored for so long – disgraceful facilities (especially toilets), dangerous policing, unfair stereotypes of supporters, crappy food, and an unwillingness of clubs to tackle naked racism inside stadiums. It was the relentless campaigning of fanzines that brought progress and action on all these pressing issues.
Gray talks to dozens of fanzine editors, and also quotes collector Neil Forsyth, who began buying fanzines from multiple teams. “I just found it incredibly exciting,” he says. “I loved reading about other teams. I loved the humor of it. The kind of punk ethos, the fact that these were just fans and they put it together.” In pre-internet times “it was a way to connect to like-minded people all around the country. You buy some English lower division fanzine and you think this humour is my kind of humour. My outlook on football and life is the same.”
Friendships and informal games between fan groups resulted through the fanzine network. Gray writes that “importantly, the idea that supporters of different teams could not mix without violence flaring was shown to be hokum.” Andy Groom of Glasgow fanzine The Web tells him, “It was music, football, anti-racism, anti-violence. All the stuff that mattered. It was like-minded people from different parts of the country, coming together.”
There are soccer books that are important, but not much fun to read — several history books come to mind. There are books that are not so important, but fun to read — player biographies that can be profoundly economical with the truth, say. It’s rare to find a book that’s both. The exhaustively researched and effortlessly entertaining Fanzine is one of those books. If you want to understand UK soccer and the radical decade between 1985 and 1995, read this outstanding work.
Soccer America rating: 9/10
• Fanzine: The story of football’s alternative press By Daniel Gray (Bloomsbury)
📖 More: A chat with When Saturday Comes, Part 1: The highs and lows of being an independent magazine | Stuff Yer Superleague! Part 2: Chat with When Saturday Comes