It has been a year now since we provided some stats on fanzines included on The List of the many and varied football print publications that have sprung up over the years so let’s dip back into that to provide you with a small update;

It is still very much the idea to get The List out these publicly and stored permanently for people to access and one place that will happen for sure is via the British Library. However there are a couple of things holding me back from doing that immediately…

1. When deposited in the British Library system The List will be “frozen” on the BL server and we won’t be able to add information or features to the list, just notes with the file. This is not an attractive proposition because…
2. More importantly, I keep finding more fanzines. For reference this means I have seen or own a copy, or have seen references to it in 2 independent places, in another fanzine or on a club forum for example.
3. I have a list of features I want to add like regional slicer, where copies are help etc and need to tidy up a lot more information, year started for example. Also in looking for bits for this piece I realised that a few descriptions I used for categories when I started don’t fit any longer so have spent a good part of this week tidying and revising them.

So, in June last year we reported that we had documented 1,706 fanzines. A quick check this morning and we are now up to 1,853…and in looking through some old stuff for this I now have 4 more to add! An increase of 147 publications (+4!) about 11 per month on average. I keep thinking the number is slowing but in truth that depends on how much time I spend looking.

The looking bit…well this is still taking time and effort not least because I’ve recently started to catalogue an important collection, the When Saturday Comes archive. You all remember the lists in WSC obviously, here’s one they made earlier in January 1991 with news of arrivals and departures, calls for cartoonists and contributors to a Nairn county fanzine and news of the 2^nd National Fanzine Fair!!

One of the rules for getting a fanzine on that list was that you had to send a physical copy to their offices. Fortunately, someone had the foresight to bung them all into mail bags and put into storage BUT they were then misplaced for several years. Happily, due to some superb detective work by the author Dan Gray we now have access to this and I’m spending time as and when I can to trawl through the hundreds of boxes containing this treasure trove (apparently there were 75 mail bags full of them delivered to the depository)

In compiling the list I went through old copies of WSC and their superb digital archive and thought I’d managed to catch all of the fanzines but it seems some slipped through either mine or WSC’s net as during the first day looking through the archive I discovered another 8  fanzines I hadn’t heard of from clubs like Rushden Town, Northallerton, Poole, Lymington Starfish Football club (yes, really from the depths of the Hayward Bournemouth League Sunday Morning Division 7 used as a club fundraiser, issue 8 appears in the archive) and further up the pyramid at Southend, Bolton and Bristol City.

I’m going to stop for a FIFA approved hydration break here; September 10^th sees the release of Dan’s new book and I urge you to reserve your copy now. Yes, it’s a book about fanzines! And is available then as a Hardback, e and audiobook from Bloomsbury with a free launch event happening at Stanchion Books in London (Why not in Boro Dan?!) https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fanzine-the-story-of-footballs-alternative-press-tickets-1988392273817

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

This is nothing to do with Dan’s book…it is an introduction to this question; What difference has the 147 (+4!) additions made to The List stats? The oldest/most prolific lists haven’t been affected but the top 10 in terms of clubs has seen a bit of movement with Newcastle and Hearts now overtaking Brighton at the top. It is astounding that Hibs, Hearts, Newcastle and Sunderland contributed 94 separate fanzines between them. Something in the waters…

Leeds have moved up the league with the addition of 6 fanzines as my fellow researchers from the Voice of the Fans exhibition dusted off their collections and remembered long-forgotten names. We have added fanzines with hyper local names like Bites Yer Legs ( used twice) and awful puns like Leeds By Example for example.

Then you end up in a conversation with someone who used to run one of the big supporters club branches and realise that things like Crossbar whichstarted in 1979 might not have been born out of fanzine mania but it was very much a prototype for what was to come, terrible copies of photos, articles about gigs as some of the younger members became more involved, calling out racism, sarcasm about and criticism of the board and the club despite being a supporters club publication, ‘Stadiaguide’ features. Recognize the recipe? This was not just dull news about coach travel and end of season awards.

You can test yourself with this description of a now long demolished ground.

Also evocative of the era there was also advice on insurance not covering U16s or assault and which grounds were the worst…

Structures

Let’s split this down by league groupings out of interest…because I can. Of the 1,853 fanzines these are the biggest groupings

• 1022 Football Leagues
• 352 non-league
• 198 Scottish Football Leagues
• 44 International
• 35 Irish League
• 33 Northern Irish League
• 32 Welsh clubs (excluding EFL clubs)
• 26 Scottish Junior
• 22 general (crossovers covering music, fashion & football in a city for eg)
• 15 ALL Scottish football
• 10 for German football (English language, distributed in the UK)

Then there are the obscure ones

• 7 covering ALL English football and non-league teams at the same time..a huge undertaking
• 6 for combined English and Scottish Football league clubs
• 4 for Sunday League teams
• 1 for New Zealand football

EFL and Scottish Football league clubs…Utd United covered Dundee United and West Ham United together, the editors never met before publication, everything was coordinated by mail and phone which might explain how the terrible pun on this cover slipped past quality control. Unsurprisingly it folded due to scarcity of audience and contributors.

New Zealand?!! Well yes, it was listed in WSC so it gets on the list as it was available from a Hemel Hempstead address. Sitter! was of course made in NZ and some enterprising soul obviously imported copies. Published for 10 years from 1995 it proclaimed itself “for serious fans, not puddings and toss pots” and there is an astounding little website outlining its history here https://sitterfanzine.weebly.com/  You can still buy old copies allegedly and copies are also available to view in national library of NZ if you’re ever passing by.

Supply and Demand

I’ve also started to do more analysis of pricing and number of pages trends… I know, I spoil you.

The chart shows that football fanzines have consistently grown in terms of amount of content and it is only in the past 10 years that the average you pay per page for that content has increased significantly. I guess this is due to supply and demand rules, inflation due to Brexit (we make almost no publication paper in the UK) and because fanzines have in some cases moved to more bespoke, higher end models supporting a digital arm.

Why did I make this chart…because you might need it one day.

Absolute Beginners

Fanzine starts by year is interesting because it seems to have become accepted that Italia 90 and Fever Pitch in 1992 kick started the mania for self-publishing and the fanzine movement…according to our research so far this is simply not true.

1987 through 1993 sees an explosion in fanzine numbers with 1988 being the largest numbers of starts we have traced. This is perhaps the most difficult part of compiling The List. We can easily trace as date if we see issue 1 and through some terrific online pieces former fanzine editors have written but we are still missing confirmed start dates for about 780 fanzines. However, at over a thousand we still have a pretty good sample size.

There are various views as to why fanzines started. It might be something simple like “well our rivals had one so we needed one” there is of course the spill over from the explosion of music fanzines and the millions who enjoyed a Friday night gig and a Saturday afternoon match. There was a desire to record the humour and culture of the terraces but most of all it was about being heard, having a voice when the police, press and government were happy just to punch down on fans and the clubs had no interest in fans beyond their ticket money.

Perhaps the most important reason then, fanzines gave voice to protest however big or small. This small piece from an incredible article on penning, overcrowding and fences in grounds appeared in Off The Ball issue 13 in February 1988 just over a year BEFORE Hillsborough. It is no coincidence that between May 1985 and April 1989 there was exponential growth in fanzines. On that disastrous day Hillsborough’s safety certificate was a decade ‘out of date’ and Thatcher/the Press/The Police tried to blame the fans…don’t get me started again.

Not quite the Final Whistle

Time is moving on and at some point I need to decide to stop but there is still much to do. Based on a few references in compilation books like Whose Game Is it Anyway? there were estimated to have been about 2000 fanzines over time so, I have sort of decided that if I get to 2000 fanzines logged, I’ll stop looking, I really do think I’ll be going in ever decreasing circles by then.

I am still searching for a way to put the list up as a searchable online resource permanently available but despite the luxury of my retired status this has proved trickier than I thought. If anyone has an idea let me know.

I will get the list stored forever on the British Library servers but in the meantime, feel free to drop me an email if you have any queries or thoughts about fanzines and I’ll keep on producing a few blogs per week (might need to drop this down to 1 for a while to complete the WSC search)

The ground was Ayresome Park by the way.