Though it is true that fanzines were almost always critical and satirical in nature and a ground ban was never far away, clubs generally used to get along with both zines and the local rag, their existence a mutual benefit to both.

Fanzine publicity was also critical to get your sales numbers above 100 or so and this blog will explore how some fanzines played on this to get free publicity and how newspapers played along as fanzines became more popular and almost mainstream.

There are lovely little reminders of how this worked dotted about the British Newspaper Archive if you are patient enough with your searches. So this week we’ll look at just some of the examples of how fanzines, clubs and papers got along…or not as the case may be.

The Publicity Machine

In October 1991 The Shropshire Star ran this A-Z list of football fanzines. Shropshire, 1991 and a list of football fanzines was appearing in the local newspaper…the press was waking up to the competition even if they missed out fanzines from clubs beginning with E, F, I, K, O, Q, U, V, X, Y and Z. To be fair to the Star, if anyone does know of a fanzine for a club beginning in X or Z we’d be happy to hear from you. There were fanzines with names beginning in X and Z, Xmas Something at Matlock Town and Zico Was a Punk Rocker which covered CliftonVille and Shamrock but was more of a general/music zine.

How about this, Dial M for Merthyr’s award for ‘Away Player of the year’ remembered in a June 1991 issue of the South Wales Echo (how many awards did you run lads?)

It’s hard to imagine now but newspapers were a very good way of getting publicity at a local level as this announcement of the arrival of Heaven 11 from the Reading Evening Post in September 1994 shows.

Simon seems to have had a direct line to someone in the Evening Post as by May 1995 he would have a ¾ page puff piece covering the fanzine.

It’s a nice little time capsule on why you’d start a fanzine (because Reading didn’t have one) and football supporting in general. The mock up of the fans as a gigantic 12^th man made up of dark matter is a bit startling as is the ad for a Peugeot 106 at the crazy piece of £6,695! (I just looked; a 1993, L Reg 106 with just 889 miles on the clock is available on Autotrader for £8,895 if you want to waste your money on one of the worst cars ever invented)

By 1994 The Daily star ran a column entitled “Who Ate All The Pies” covering the frightening world of football…as covered by fanzines. Phobias, Psycho ‘n Soaps’ lists some tremendous sounding pieces in fanzines from some of the classic names. I very much like the suggestions for run out music, from King of The Kippax. Hey Big Spender has some tremendous ideas including an imaginary pub league fixture between Eastenders and Coronation Street and the 69er’s imaginary TV guide takes some beating.

In 1996, with Euro fever sweeping the nation even more fanzines were given free publicity from the mainstream press with this list of 101 of the strangest fanzines appearing in The People.

The description of fanzines as “Some Angry, some plain daft” is as good a general definition as you’ll see. The list is also very useful as a reminder of the great selection of the fanzines from all corners of mainland Britain; North (Ft William, Claggan Gold, Fort William), South (January 3, 1988, Portsmouth) East (I Can Drive a Tractor, Norwich and West (Peter Hick’s Wig, St Austell.)

Not only that but as we’ve mentioned before the breadth of creativity in names is magnificent, Where’s The Money Gone from Leicester could have been launched today..

Inversely Proportional

It will shock you to know that there was even an occasion when a fanzine AGREED with the local paper and their local Tory MP!!

Though I’m sure the MP was outraged when The Birmingham Daily Post ran this in 1989 I’m pretty sure the paper and the editor of A Load of Bull were clearly being a little tongue in cheek. The comparisons with the lying shitbags at the Sun were hardly reasonable and the thought of sales of the Grundiad (sic) falling in Wolverhampton begs the question ‘how much further?’ The terraces at Molineux were never really tree hugging, sandal wearing territory now were they. You also can’t help feeling that just about every other club’s supporter in the West Midlands and let’s be honest, much further beyond would have found this highly amusing.

Sometimes things with newspapers went wrong, very wrong. In yet another example of a fanzine manufacturing something to raise circulation, it is revealed by the former editor of Swindon’s Randy Robin that as circulation was low on issue 1 they decided issue 2 needed more publicity. Miraculously a local paper ran a story of how the nascent fanzine had been banned from the county ground with a picture of the “pubescent and piqued” editor outside an empty County Ground, brandishing a copy of the banned rag.

I’ll let Matt Arnold (@HaroldFlem) take up the story himself “my friends and I had decided to whip up some free publicity. So I rang up the club, to innocently enquire whether I could sell the fanzine at the ground. Not unreasonably, the mandarin dispatched to deal with this upstart, informed me what I already knew, that only official publications, i.e. the programme, were permitted. Murmurings about this snub to entrepreneurial schoolboys by crusty officialdom soon reached the ear of a friendly journalist, and, lo, tidings of this little local difficulty were duly dropped through the town’s letterboxes just days later. Profile plumped up by the local paper, the next few issues the Randy Robin followed a familiar course.”[1]

Matt and the gang went on with this ruse for a while until a quote from a now lost magazine was attributed to a local journo “The words Steve McMahon and ‘man management’ don’t go together in the same sentence”. The journo was not having this and without the source went on to deny all knowledge of this in the Advertiser and “derided our legally dubious disclaimer in the front of each edition ‘We’re all under 16, so please don’t sue us’; before drawing readers attention to our flagrant, shameless and un-credited use of the paper’s copyrighted photos in the fanzine.” Unfortunately, this was the beginning of the end for the fanzine as fans declined copies saying it was “full of lies” which begs the question whether they’d ever seen about 50% of the content in any fanzine before.

Shades of Grey

One fanzine editor was even asked to write a column for the world famous, Birmingham based local Saturday sports paper ‘The Sports Argus”. Grorty Dick’s Simon Wright presented this ‘Alternative View’ in February 1992

It’s a great piece covering the difference between journalists and fanzine editors, the fact that despite appearances, sometimes there WERE limits on what a fanzine would say or do. The tension of being too close to the club or totally independent of the club (cut off from all contact) is also addressed…shades of grey are invoked well before that became a grubby interjection.

Passion or Patience, Rage or Reason

To finish let’s go back to 1991 and this piece that appeared in the Burntwood Post on the 28^th November 1991. Not familiar with that journal? Well, it was published in Stafford and they asked a sociologist to give his view of fanzines…

Despite getting the origin of fanzines wrong, in an otherwise quite extraordinary piece John Horne from Stafford Poly states that “They are a case of successful cultural contestation in and through sport.” Google translate was no help but thankfully John clarifies “Roughly translated for the likes of you and me that means they are a grass roots bid by real fans to reclaim the sport from the money men, media and Maxwells of this world”.

I do think that he hits another nail on the head, when saying “I think I can safely say that the worse the team, the better the fanzine” as “they combine ardent support for their team with a stoic acceptance of the team’s performance” Having looked at thousands of fanzines I can only agree with this sentiment. You’ll be pleased to know that superb fanzine Dial M for Merthyr AND Flaming Fires of Wombourne (full supply and installation service of the highest quality wood-burning, multi-fuel, gas and electric fires, stoves and fireplaces) still exist. Maybe if you mention a fanzine to Flaming Fires they’ll give you a discount?

Final Whistle

More than ever, this trawl through the newspaper and fanzine archives leaves me wishing that vast parts of the bloody internet and fan forums had never arrived. Let’s face it 95% of podcasts and “content creators” like that Manchester United performative bore are largely impotent attention seeking bullshit and do nothing to address key issues in football today. They’re just trick acts dealing in ‘amusing’ rants or nostalgia focussed on clicks with stuff that though occasionally is vaguely amusing overlooks some of the truly awful things going on in football.

Print fanzines were never that, they fought, they gave voice to fans and the surreal and sometimes cruel humour of the terraces. It will be a very sad day if/when that completely goes away.

So I’ll end with this magnificent article from the Gloucester Citizen from December 1991. It stars Stroud fanzine Rovers Return, the 16 year old editor, some solicitors and the chairman of Stroud FC plus a severe parental talking to. Absolutely magnificent, if anyone has a copy please let me know.

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[1] https://thewashbag.com/2014/11/10/confessions-of-a-teenage-fanzine-editor/