The second of our blogs about the amazing stories behind just a few of the vast array of football fanzine names on the first comprehensive list of all fanzines that existed over the past 60 or so years, a very small proportion of which were celebrated at the 2025 Voice of the Fan exhibition in Leeds central library.

MG5YP

Let’s start with the surreal; a Hasting Town fanzine started up in 1990 as “Ghost of United” in memory of Hastings United who folded in…1985. If that wasn’t brilliant enough after issue 21 in 1999 the fanzine changed name to “Ghost of MG 5YP” commemorating their lottery millionaire owner Mark Gardiner who tried and failed to merge the club with local rivals St Leonards.

He assembled an “expensive” squad, all part of a 5-year plan to get Hasting Town into the Nationwide League. Unfortunately, after a few bad results he lost interest, transfer listed the entire squad and resigned the club from the league before trying unsuccessfully to rescind this. The club collapsed into administration and were relegated to the Dr Martens Eastern division at the end of the 98/99 season. A consortium led bizarrely by another local lottery winner saved the club from folding. Though the fanzine largely consisted of match reports the fanzines’ two names marking the exploits of these two golden eras is a stroke of genius and the club lives on even if the fanzine doesn’t.

Not enough for you? then how about this please concerning minibuses to away games shared with the players. A vivid reminder that if you’re worried about your club providing tickets to some schools for a game expected to be a sell-out you’re not really focussing on the right things.

Every Man a Football Artist

EMFA was the somewhat mysterious original name for Kilkenny City FC and the acronym for their fanzine but fear not, there is a tremendous video here explaining history of the club behind the name of the fanzine.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PFdD5g4MW0 It starts out claiming that the city has been witness to many great sporting achievements through the years before listing the All Ireland Hurling cup win in 1983 as the only one. (In fact they have been All Ireland winners 36 times and runners up 29 times)

With that in mind it’s incredible that EMFA FC was created and went on to climb right through the Irish junior leagues to be part of the League of Ireland.  Luckily Jim Rhatigan, Alex Ferguson lookalike and a founder member is on hand to explain that the name derives from the intersection of two roads – Emmett Street and Fatima Place- in the city suburbs where the club was founded and that they formed after…watching England in the 1966 World Cup.

Acclaimed local author and sportswriter Enda McEvoy produced a fanzine with the tongue in cheek name Every Man a Football Artist in honour of the origin name and though copies are hard to come by they are stored in the National Library of Ireland, issues no. 1 [April 1989] through 5 [May 1991] if you’re ever over there.

Unfortunately, the fanzine didn’t last long and the club folded in 2008 because of “lack of finance, poor results and paltry attendances”..this was the story of various attempts to introduce football in the city over the years, no wonder with that Hurling club record.

In 2016 Kilkenny live excitedly reported that that Manuel Pellegrini had visited the city so you never know what might happen next.

Abandon Chip!

Talking of paltry attendances, Scarborough fans made fanzine names into an art form. I mean look, they called their stadium the “Theatre of Chips” after local and much-loved oven chip company McCains sponsored the ground. They also had a sensational percentage in terms of great names for the 8 (yes, eight) Scarborough fanzines we found “2’s company, 500’s a crowd”, self-explanatory really. “Beyond the 843”, a reference to the Coastliner bus that went past the ground but perhaps the best Scarborough fanzine name was “Abandon Chip!”.

Another fanzine called “The Seadog Bites Back” succeeded these and in what might just have been a bit of publicity stunt embroiled itself in a row with the council over a proposed Seagull cull. Many fanzines would do this over the years, a subject for another blog another time.

And now some words about a goat

Fanzine names often recounted important episodes in a football or a club’s history, or just strange ones…The May 1994 list of fanzines in When Saturday Comes announces a new fanzine for IFC Köln called Hennes with an address in Germany to write to. Hennes was named after…a goat, the club mascot, currently on his 9^th incarnation (Intriguingly noticeably bigger than the previous incarnation according to the club website https://fc.de/en/club/about-the-club/hennes-the-mascot-of-1-fc-koeln ).

According to the Behind the Badge feature on These Football Times[1] “on 13th February 1950, the club were visited by a travelling circus. The circus had found a stray goat and her kid when travelling from Prague to Neustadt at the end of the Second World War. As part of Karneval celebrations, circus director Carola Williams gifted the now-adult goat to the club as a good luck charm. Köln adopted this as their mascot” and here we are today with me writing about a goat.

I can’t find much about the fanzine but the goat lives on and if you want to see some clips of him escaping from his handlers on the pitch during a Bundesliga 2 game in 2014 click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnYV2wdoPpE

The Final Whistle

Fanzines came in all shapes and sizes and came about for all sorts of reasons. The contents were invariably fantastic in some way but then there are the stories behind the names…we hope you’ve enjoyed the storied behind just a few and we’ll return to this subject to investigate magicians, dogs and otherwise long forgotten football games in a later blog.

See you next time, pass this on to someone you care about and don’t forget our Twitter/X/Bluesky/insta/Facebook posts which appear as mini blogs at an infuriatingly vague frequency.

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[1] https://thesefootballtimes.co/2020/05/04/behind-the-badge-the-story-of-fc-koln-and-hennes-the-goat/