In the 80s there wasn’t much in a rural Derbyshire village beyond riding over hill and dale, sci fi from the library and the music of the John Peel show. Oh yeah, there was football obviously, playing and watching it. Access to games came through travelling home and away to every Chesterfield game we could with a friend’s dad in his “reliable” Austin Princess, winter Tuesday nights in Oldham, Blackpool, Hartlepool and Rochdale…I read Shoot avidly until that wasn’t a cool thing to do at university and then football fanzines really arrived. (If you want to see old issues of Shoot you should follow @skystrikers on twitter, you’ll love this https://www.flickr.com/photos/114058793@N05/ )

Skip forward “a couple” of years and in 2024 Leeds central library put out a call asking for volunteers for a project on Football Fanzine Culture called Voice of the Fans. Manna from heaven for me, retired, time to burn, what more could I ask for?

Our first project meeting at the Leeds central library was an eye opener, the librarians laid out what they had and the problems they faced. Firstly they had a lot of stuff and secondly they didn’t fully realise what they had. Step forward the magnificent 7 slightly ageing volunteers who droned on for about an hour about what fanzines meant then and mean now to football fans and why it was such an important part of the 80s and 90s… Protest, humour, the fan’s voice, a dramatic change in culture, all of these and more in and on the pages of a group of scruffy, some might say amateur looking collections of magazines and pamphlets disguised as fanzines, plans for an exhibition were formed.

Like any good research we quickly structured the project into themes and set to work. My role was to look at historical context and the voice of the fan before fanzines, a role which (un)fortunately involved the incredible microfilm archives in the library (incredible because THERE IS MILES AND MILES OF IT!)

If you don’t know what microfilm is you clearly haven’t lived. It’s a long strip of photographic film in 16 or 35mm format storing information like newspapers, so a reel of film which has the imprint of a month or two of EVERY page of a newspaper, usually in negative form. Just pray it’s not a sunny day outside and the sunlight isn’t falling on the screen. Still lost? ask your grandparents.

Amongst other wonderful things Leeds Central Library has copies of Leeds newspapers going back well into the 1800s, every single page of every single day. So you just scroll through, manually on some of the machines and there is no indexing, no search feature, you just have to scroll, stop, scan…ad infinitum, over and over.

Realising quickly I couldn’t just look at every day we decided to look at blocks of dates that might have interesting information, so the early days of Leeds City, the Herbert Chapman years, the fall of Leeds City, the formation of Leeds United and then on to post World War II football, the glory years and fan letters in the following decades right up to the time football fanzines really arrived in the 80s. This still took months but the first 3 blogs on Gerry Francis on this blog site show just one of the many interesting aspects of the history of football in Leeds we have been able to reveal. We’ll return to Leeds City, Leeds United strips, Herbert Chapman and the voice of the fan pre fanzines later.

It quickly got to the point where we already had way too much for the small part of the exhibition historical context would take up. So, one day as we were talking about the sheer number of fanzines there used to be for Leeds United, then for Bradford City, then in Yorkshire, then nationwide, I started to think.. and then I started to search.

Months later the answers would turn out to be

• 18 (with 1 joint Leeds/Arbroath joint fanzine),
• 12 (9 for Bradford City with another 3 for Park Avenue!)
• 111 (Not including Middlesborough but including Scarborough and District League Division Three side Thornton Le Dale, we’ll talk about “The Escaped Horse” in a later blog)
• 1691 so far

Basically, we created a monster, a list of all the football fanzines that existed in the British Isles with a couple beyond that for good measure. Like any good list it’s more than that, it details all sorts of obscure facts about the fanzines and so blogs were mentioned.

In the coming months we’ll talk about many, many fanzines, talk to their creators if possible, talk about the media personalities who started in fanzines (Danny Baker, Irvine Welsh, Pete  Doherty and many many more), the history of fanzines, the reasons behind the names of fanzines, the many and varied links to music and the HUGE influence the football fanzines that were created 50-60 years ago had on changing culture then and moulding what is the media and arts today.

We’ll cover the humour, the scrapes they were involved in, the style and the protest culture football fanzines embraced and the influence that has had. Oh, and because of a “late night” eBay foray how I inadvertently became the owner of perhaps the largest private collection of Pete McKee cartoons in the world.

Put simply, if football fanzines hadn’t exploded in numbers in the late 80s then the landscape we look at, the grounds we attend and the fandom we exist in would have been very different.

We have a Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61574821671052 and Bluesky account @fanzinefc.bsky.social that will cover all sorts of aspects of fanzines during and after the event

There is so much more to be revealed in the exhibition at Leeds central library from the 9^th May to the 10^th August 2025 and so many more aspects of this incredible era in football and publishing that we’ll continue to tell during and after that. Come along and join us then in the library, and we hope you’ll enjoy these blogs at https://secretlibraryleeds.net/local-history/sport/voice-of-the-fans/