A tale about either non league fandom or the perils of “tired and emotional” late night forays onto eBay, you decide….When I opened the latest late night eBay bounty package yesterday, 20 old football fanzines spilled out and I had the pleasant surprise of not only a new fanzine to me but a first issue as well. Even better, it was a non league fanzine from 1981, Soccer Scene, a Barrow AFC fanzine from the days when they were in the newly formed Alliance Premier League, the first league outside the Football League to cover the whole of England.

It really is a great little fanzine; 20p, a rattle on the cover, ad for the sadly defunct local Abbey Tavern but just savour the memory of that £3.95 Sunday lunch including service! The fantastic current Barrow fanzine @giveembeans.bsky.social have been in touch to inform me that they mention the Abbey in current print zine under their “Lost pubs” feature. Serendipity!

Back in 1981 Scene produced a full fixture list for the season with a fantastic picture of the previous season’s player of the year presentation.

This fanzine demonstrated one of the many great aspects of the list we’ve drawn up, the depth and breadth of superb football coverage fanzines provided, very strong right down “The pyramid” in the 80s and 90s. We’ve discovered 319 fanzines covering non league clubs in England alone with a further 37 in Scottish junior football and 31 in Wales. (You need to sort out how many of the 35 Irish fanzines were also part timers as well- Ed)

These weren’t all just a few pages hastily typed and stapled together either. I’ve the first issue of a Dagenham and Redbridge fanzine from 2004 that ran to 50 pages for £1.20! Big stories as well, Pyramid Football (The magazine for Non League Fans By Non League Fans) was in its 11^th season in 1995/6 when they covered a sensational story about a crossbar crisis at Prudhoe on the front page.

Crossbar crisis in Northumberland not enough for you? How about a fanzine covering all (and we mean ALL) of the myriad leagues in “Avon Soccerworld” from 1986. I love this fanzine, superb cartoon on the front cover and after that it’s just cobbled together 20-to-40-word reports on games and league tables cut and pasted from local newspapers. It also has some superb ads for local businesses, a topic we’ll return to at some point.

Is it a true fanzine? Well though it’s not humorous in any way shape or form or a protest piece it’s VERY independent, must have been run by volunteers and I cannot imagine the amount of work that went into this in someone’s spare time. Yes, it’s a fanzine, passionate about a topic, ridiculously creative and a labour of love, I have issue 50 so whoever created this had worked very hard for a very long time. Chapeau, if you’re still out there please get in touch so I can credit you.

This was supposed to be a quick blog to briefly explain just how much ground there is to cover in the many many stories behind fanzines and the fanzine culture that exploded in the 80s and 90s. But here I am 2 hours later after going down another rabbit hole researching the shocking news of a club upping sticks and moving away from its hometown in the 70s.

This is from the very formal and dry “Non League Soccer Incorporating Southern League Monthly and Covering the Northern Premier League” which, along with a great name also manages to be absolutely engrossing.

After some very confusing searches involving South Shields FC, South Shields, South Shields Adelaide, Gateshead FC, Gateshead United FC, Gateshead AFC and Gateshead United it turns out that this had happened before when the original South Shields team moved to Gateshead in 1930…I’m still confused.

Anyway, Gateshead United (Lets just call them Franchise FC) folded in 1977, three years after this move. It’s a story as fresh today as it was then, strapped councils, expansion plans, ground improvements needed….does anything change? Joking aside it’s always sad to read of the demise of a football club that a community cared for so much that they reformed as another entity still around in South Shields today…though it might be another club called South Shields, I need to move on though.

We currently have 1695 football fanzines on the list we have compiled, more details of which will be revealed during the free to visit Voice of the Fan exhibition running at Leeds central library from May to August this year. Come along and join us physically in Leeds and metaphorically in these blogs, there is so much more to tell you..