From fanzines to blogs: supporters writing about football

Why do football fans start blogging?

Many devoted football supporters reach a point where watching the game is not enough and they want to share their views with other fans. Some spend weeks looking for an existing blog or forum where their knowledge would find a home, and eventually decide to start their own.

What can readers expect from a fan blog?

Most fan blogs are driven by two things: a love of writing and, above all, a love of football. A typical fan blog covers football news, match analysis, reviews, betting previews, tips and more. The Premier League, the Champions League, the European Qualifiers and many other competitions all tend to feature. Betting on sports is a common second passion, and many such writers aim to help readers think through their choices before placing a bet. Fan bloggers also like to write under a nickname; one taken from a favourite player, such as "Scholesy", tells real football fans straight away whom the writer admires.

What will readers hear from a fan blogger?

Professional media outlets often keep their sources and reasoning to themselves. The best fan blogs take the opposite approach and share everything: what the writer knows about football and the game itself, views on the best ways to approach betting, the latest football news and interesting stories from the game's past. Questions from readers are usually welcome, and the conversation in the comments is often as lively as the posts themselves.

What does a fan blog promise its readers?

It may sound like a politician's pledge, but the usual promise is regular posts and honest opinions. Fan bloggers can afford to criticise players and managers in a way that clubs and sponsors cannot, and they are rarely shy about saying when someone is not playing well. That direct, outspoken style is a large part of why readers come back.

Before blogs: the fanzines

Football supporters were writing about their clubs long before the internet. In Britain the first football fanzine is usually taken to be Foul, which ran from 1972 to 1976.

Club-based titles followed in the early 1980s. Terrace Talk, written by York City supporters, first appeared in November 1981, and The City Gent, the Bradford City fanzine, went on sale in November 1984. Both were written by supporters of the club rather than by professional journalists, a model that many other clubs' fans would copy.

When Saturday Comes

The best-known title of all, When Saturday Comes, began as an offshoot of a music fanzine called Snipe. The first issue appeared in March 1986, given away free with a copy of Snipe. The magazine was conceived by the journalist Mike Ticher, and Andy Lyons later became its editor. Within two years it had grown from a hand-stapled, photocopied bimonthly into a nationally distributed monthly magazine, and in the mid-1990s its circulation peaked at more than 30,000 copies per issue.

Unlike most fanzines, When Saturday Comes did not follow a single club. It covered the whole game, and its success encouraged many more club titles in the late 1980s, a period often described as a golden age for fanzines. A Kick up the Rs, the Queens Park Rangers fanzine, was first published in August 1987, for example. Over the years When Saturday Comes also gave space to writers who became well known in football journalism and beyond, among them David Conn, Barney Ronay and Nick Hornby, and in 2016 it published a digital archive of every issue since 1986.

From paper to the web

Most Premier League and Football League clubs came to have one or more fanzines, and the habit spread to non-league football as well. With the arrival of widespread internet access, much of the energy that had gone into printed fanzines moved into supporters' websites, forums and, later, blogs. The motivation stayed much the same: a wish to discuss the game honestly, from the stands rather than the boardroom.