Soccerama

Soccerama is a UK-based 336-page quarterly football magazine/book, founded and edited by Hyder Gareth Jawád, which began life in October 2015. Soccerama, part of a growing portfolio of popular-culture and sport publications all produced and designed in the same style, is in the process of becoming a cooperative. Soccerama claims to be at the serious end of the journalism spectrum, with large, in-depth features, essays, interviews, and original research. The Soccerama idea is based on the editor's long-held ambition to create a football publication in the style of Granta.

Soccerama has the tagline "The Culture of Football". The second edition, Soccerama 02, was published in summer 2016, with printing taking place in London and Los Angeles.

Jawád, a journalist, publisher and PhD student from Liverpool, England, has worked as a sportswriter and/or sub-editor for the Liverpool Echo (1990-99), The Times (1999-2001, on a full-time freelance basis), the Birmingham Post (2001-07, as chief sportswriter), and The Independent (2007-08, on a full-time freelance basis). ^{[1] [2]} Jawad won the Press Gazette's British Sportswriter of the Year for regional newspapers in 2005. ^[3]

The first edition of Soccerama was published on October 21, 2015^[4] and sold out its original print run of 512 test copies within three weeks.^[5] The editor described the initial print run as an "uncorrected proof edition; essentially, a demo to see the level of interest in such a publication". Having revised the first edition, the publishers produced a reprint in January 2016, which also sold out. The publishers initiated a third print run in February 2016.

The Soccerama raison d'être is to publish timeless, in-depth features about the culture, the politics, the people and places of football, with a mixture of historical research, travelogue, and interviews with figures of the modern game. There are also significant obituary and book-review sections. Soccerama has been compared with The Blizzard.^[5][6]

In the "mission statement" to the first edition of Soccerama, the editor states that the "publication [is] produced by one man, with one laptop, and one telephone, in one coffee shop, over a period of three months".^[7] The plan, however, is that, "in the fullness of time, the one-man band will become a forty-piece orchestra" - as and when budget increases allow.^[8]

The Soccerama publishers are also planning a pilot for a tennis version of the publication, First Serve: The Culture of Tennis. The publishers are also planning a cricket version, entitled Pavilion: The Culture of Cricket, and a popular-music version, entitled Melody Fair: The Culture of Music.

Although Soccerama is set to become a monthly, it has all the characteristics of a large-format paperback book. The first edition contained 131,000 words of material, the second 135,000 words, and each edition has its own unique ISBN.^[4]

The first edition contained the following features:

• Dynasty: the story of Chile's famous Prieto brothers, Andrés Prieto and Ignacio Prieto
• The history of the Football League Review magazine
• Colin Grainger, the former England international winger, writes about his West Riding childhood
• The complete script of Sa'id Milton's film, '82 And All That, about the New Zealand football team's qualification for the 1982 World Cup in Spain
• Billy Ashcroft interview about his time playing for FC Twente in the Netherlands
• Jimmy McGovern interview about his Liverpool FC influences
• Younis Mahmoud interview about his time as Iraq's most distinguished player
• The life and works of Brian Glanville
• Bob Valentine interview about his experiences refereeing around the world
• Obituaries of 126 footballers who died from the end of May to the beginning of October 2015
• Manchester United's strange Football League 1985-86 campaign
• Kim Tate, an American soccer official based in Mexico, provides observations of her football life in Tijuana and Torreón

The editor welcomed readers to the first edition with an irreverent, self-deprecating introduction:

"Welcome to Soccerama – the culture of football. I would love to write a long, passionate justification for the publication’s raison d'être, but I do not want to test your patience. I have not yet earned the right to validate the Soccerama editorial policies or to promote any lofty ambitions or to display any self-indulgence. A publication produced by one man, with one laptop, and one telephone, in one coffee shop, over a period of three months, should begin with an attitude of humility. One hopes that, in the fullness of time, the one-man band will become a forty-piece orchestra. What you hold here, Soccerama 01, should tell you something about what this project is trying to do and where it is hoping to go. If you like what you see, please stick around for more – and please pass the word around. I want to make a virtue of eclecticism. The plan is to make Soccerama 02 better, and Soccerama 03 even better again, and so forth. I do not claim credit for the Soccerama name. It was the title of a football board game that emerged in 1968 and benefited from a successful marketing campaign involving Alan Ball, England’s beloved fireball at the 1966 World Cup. But I like the Soccerama appellation – and I hope it becomes part of the football vernacular again in the form of this new quarterly publication."^[9]

Intriguingly, for purely contextual reasons, the editor also published the original introductions to the first editions of other significant football magazines, such as Charles Buchan's Football Monthly, World Soccer, Soccer Review, Shoot!, League Football, Netstretcher, Match Weekly, When Saturday Comes, and The Blizzard.^[10]

Clive Toye, the former president of New York Cosmos, and the North American Soccer League, who is credited with taking Pelé to the United States in 1975, joined Soccerama as a columnist from the second edition.^[11] David Pleat, the former Nottingham Forest winger and the former manager of Tottenham Hotspur, Luton Town and Leicester City, began contributing to Soccerama from the second edition. ^[12]

Soccerama 02 included:

• Football influences on the Clifton Estate by David Pleat
• The first Clive Toye column, People and Places
• The story of the Rothmans Football Yearbook by Hyder Jawad
• Peter Hooton, leading singer of The Farm, on the social and political implications of the Hillsborough Inquest conclusions
• Lines from the Pavilion by Colin Grainger
• The tragedy of Ahmad Ottun, one of Nigeria's 1949 pioneers, by Hyder Jawad
• Olympic Games 2016 football tournament: dispatches from Rio by Kaz Mochlinski
• Euro 2016: dispatches from Paris by Hyder Jawad
• Obituaries of more than 300 footballers who died during the period October 2015 to September 2016
• The story of Florentino Broce, the Philippines' football icon
• Richard Sloley and The Argonauts by Steve Menary
• An inside look at the creation of Roy of the Rovers magazine by Hyder Jawad, with contributions from Barrie Tomlinson
• Letters to Billy Walker: friends and fans write to the Aston Villa legend on his move to Sheffield Wednesday in 1933
• The curious birth of Manchester United, from primary sources (1902-1910)
• Rare amateur photographs from inside Uruguay's camp at the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland
• A review column featuring articles on 40 recently published books

Soccerama 03 began production in Auckland, New Zealand in October 2016, with post-production planned to take place in Libreville, Gabon during the Africa Cup of Nations 2017.

Board game

Soccerama is also the name of a board game published in 1968 by ASL Pastimes Ltd.^[13]

References