How fanzine culture gave a voice to supporters and changed English football

New York Times

16 hours ago

The titles were often gloriously creative and diverse, some paying homage to terrace anthems, others making a clever play on words. Sales were decent, too, with more than one million copies shifted per year at the height of what quickly became a phenomenon.
We're talking about the rise of football fanzines in the 1980s. Those purveyors of insight and irreverence who arrived on the scene when the game was on its knees in a troubled decade and helped spark a revival.
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Not just through fan activism, though there was plenty of that as fanzines joined the fight against compulsory ID cards, club mergers, and even proposals for a new European Super League featuring England's biggest names more than three decades before the more recent incarnation reared its ugly head in 2021.
But, by giving supporters a long overdue voice at a time when they were considered pariahs by wider society, fanzines revealed those on the terraces to be intelligent, passionate people who had something to say beyond the cliched ''Ere We Go!' battle cry so beloved of the tabloid newspapers when generalising fans as hooligans.
'What fanzines did was offer an alternative voice that represented a much broader variety of perspectives on footballing culture,' says Kenn Taylor, part of the team behind Voice of the Fans, a new exhibition at Leeds Central Library exploring how fanzines helped change football.
'They critiqued clubs and critiqued aspects of footballing culture. But they also celebrated it and brought a really different kind of perspective. They allowed different groups of fans, some of whom experienced prejudice, to express themselves to show that they exist, too.'
There had been earlier versions of fan magazines. Foul, a deliberate parody of magazines such as Shoot! and Goal, was produced by a group of Cambridge Students and ran for four years from 1972, while The End first landed on Merseyside in 1981 with an intoxicating mix of music, football and biting wit that ran for 20 issues and was edited by Peter Hooton, future lead singer of The Farm.
But, really, the start of what would quickly become a truly national movement started with the arrival of club-oriented publications, such as Terrace Talk (York City), City Gent (Bradford City) and Fingerpost (West Bromwich Albion).
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There was no single issue bonding together these early trailblazers other than a desire to offer an alternative view on clubs whose media coverage was largely restricted to the back page of the local newspaper and a rather staid, flimsy matchday programme.
Soon, though, this early trickle of new titles had turned into a flood, with When Saturday Comes, surely the wise old grandfather of them all these days, first hitting the streets in 1986.
Before long, every professional club in the UK had at least one publication chronicling their failings or otherwise and Sportspages, an independent book shop just off the Charing Cross Road in London piled high with fanzines from across the UK, became a tourist destination in itself as fans clamoured to buy the latest copy of Hit The Bar, The Gooner or Elm Park Disease.
Visitors to Sportspages at the height of this publishing boom may also have enjoyed the artistic debut of future big names such as Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh and Libertines singer Pete Doherty, who wrote for Hibs Monthly (Hibernian) and All Quiet On The Western Avenue (Queens Park Rangers) respectively in their formative years.
The Voice of the Fans exhibition claims that by 1992, more than 600 fanzines had appeared. Some proved short-lived, lasting just a few issues. But others, including hardy perennials United We Stand (Manchester United) and The Square Ball (Leeds United), are still going strong today in printed form despite so many of their peers having been swallowed up online.
'Heritage and tradition are perhaps the main reason there is still an appetite for the printed fanzine in our case,' says Mike Harrison, editor of City Gent, the longest-running fanzine in the country, which passed its 40th anniversary in October.
'Plus, as there is no longer a printed (matchday) programme produced by the club, City Gent is documenting what it is like to be a supporter of Bradford City from the fans' perspective.'
Football and music have long been natural bedfellows, so it is perhaps not surprising that the roots of the fanzine movement that spawned such classics as There's Only One F in Fulham and Sing When We're Fishing lay in the record industry.
In the late 1970s, punk briefly ruled the roost and the genre's DIY ethic struck a chord with fans who had grown tired of the music press and fancied having a go themselves.
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Soon, Sniffin' Glue and Anarchy in the UK were required reading for gig-goers. In the main, these rough and ready fanzines — literally a blend of 'fan' and 'magazine' — looked to have been run off on the office photocopier when the boss wasn't looking. Crucially, though, they carried an authentic voice.
Football followed suit just as the sport was hitting rock bottom. The Bradford City fire on May 11, 1985, which claimed 56 lives, came less than three weeks before another 39 supporters were killed at Heysel during a fatal charge by Liverpool fans before the European Cup final.
Attendances had already slumped to less than 16.5 million across all four divisions of English football in the season that culminated in those two disasters. To put this 1984-85 figure into context, a combined 36.2 million people came through the turnstiles of the 92 Premier League and EFL clubs in 2023-24.
Hooliganism, fuelled by often lurid coverage in the tabloids, helps partly explain why the public had become so turned off by a game that, in the years immediately after the Second World War, had regularly attracted a combined annual audience of 40 million fans.
But there was also a lack of care from those in charge that allowed depressing episode after depressing episode to fester. These included a plan to merge Oxford United and Reading to form the Thames Valley Royals — as well as squeeze Fulham and Queen's Park Rangers into Fulham Park Rangers — around the same time Charlton Athletic abandoned The Valley. All three sagas had a happy ending eventually, thanks in no small part to the campaigning efforts of supporters.
Into this mid-1980s maelstrom stepped the fanzines and a wonderful array of titles. Some drew on popular terrace chants such as Fortune's Always Hiding (West Ham United), Tired and Weary (Birmingham City) and the aforementioned Grimsby Town ditty about fishing.
Then there were the clever puns, such as A Kick Up The R's (QPR), the Leyton Orientear and The Exe-Directory (Exeter City). Others required a tad more explanation, with War of the Monster Trucks a dig at Yorkshire Television from Sheffield Wednesday fans after the regional channel had cut short live coverage of their team's 1991 League Cup celebrations at Wembley to broadcast a repeat of a show first aired five years earlier.
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Popular music also proved to be a breeding ground, with 4,000 Holes (Blackburn Rovers) paying homage to A Day in the Life by The Beatles, which features a line about how the Lancashire town's streets had 4,000 potholes requiring repair that John Lennon lifted straight from a newspaper report.
Similarly, Gillingham's Brian Moore's Head Looks Uncannily Like The London Planetarium owed its rather left-field title to a Half Man Half Biscuit song about Moore, the ITV commentator and Gillingham director.
'One of the charms of football 'zines is they have that irreverence,' adds Taylor, lead culture producer (North) at the British Library. 'Really smart humour, full of wit. Everything from the headlines to the writing.
'It was a unique style at the time. This wasn't how things were conveyed, certainly before the advent of digital media.'
Humour was, indeed, a big part of the fanzine movement from the start. This included poking fun at local rivals, such as when Bradford's City Gent produced a one-off booklet titled, 'Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Super Leeds'. All 100 pages were blank and it sold out within days, prompting a second print run to be ordered with the tagline, 'Painstakingly updated'.
Around the same time, the front covers of When Saturday Comes — complete with photograph, headline and a provocative speech bubble — started to rival those of Private Eye, the satirical magazine that, for generations, had poked fun at royals, politicians and celebrities.
Most were designed to amuse, but some WSC covers spoke better than a thousand words ever could, including arguably their finest effort in response to the Hillsborough disaster that saw 97 lives lost at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.
As the blame game began in earnest over what had caused the biggest disaster in British football history, the June issue ran four photos under the headline, 'Hillsborough: Unanimous Verdict'.
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'It's not our fault,' read the speech bubbles accompanying the images of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Football Association chief executive Graham Kelly and Peter Wright, the chief constable of South Yorkshire Police.
The final photo, featuring a massed bank of supporters, carried the message, 'Oh well, it must be our fault again.'
As highlighted in the Voice of the Fans exhibition, When Saturday Comes also railed against plans for a domestic 'Super League' in their second issue, a full 35 years before similar arguments were made in opposition to a proposed European Super League that was eventually quashed by supporters able to mobilise through social media.
Smartphones or message boards may not have been available when Charlton fanzine Voice of the Valley was first published in 1988. But that didn't stop it from helping to bring about real change.
Having vacated The Valley in September 1985 due to being unable to afford the necessary safety work, the London club moved in, first, with Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park and then West Ham at Upton Park.
The team was successful on the pitch, even spending four years in the top flight alongside the likes of Liverpool, Everton and Arsenal after winning promotion in 1986, but supporters clamoured for a return to their spiritual home.
Voice of the Valley, alongside the supporters club, helped turn that dream into reality by being at the forefront of a campaign that culminated in the Valley Party being formed to contest the 1990 local election after Greenwich Council had rejected the club's plans to rebuild their old stadium.
Charlton's most important victory in decades came at the ballot box, as the Valley Party claimed 11 per cent of the votes cast with 14,838 — an unprecedented performance by a single-issue party.
That the chair of the planning committee, who had rejected Charlton's application, lost his seat on a memorable night only added to the sense of achievement, and a little over two years later, football had returned to The Valley.
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''Zines were a hugely important medium,' says Taylor. 'They allowed fans to share opinions in a way that could connect right across a fanbase. Today, that fan voice is more important than ever.
'Multi-media has changed so much since the period when there were hundreds of printed publications coming out. But one of the things we try to capture in the exhibition is how print remains very much alive.
'We found at least 60 print football 'zines still being published. Regular ones, too, not just a one-off issue. That's got to be a big positive.'
Voice of the Fans runs until August 10, 2025, at Leeds Central Library. Further details are available here. Admission is free.