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    Remembrance of mags past

    Anyone else remember reading 90 Minutes and/or Total Football? The first was a weekly magazine, while the second was a monthly in the WSC vein, but both appeared to go out of print without any warning. I still have a season preview, which covered all the English and Scottish clubs, and it seems surprising that they collapsed, while lesser mags like Four Four Two are still in business.

    #2
    Remembrance of mags past

    I had a few things printed in Total Football, which all in all was a pretty terrible mag. Ben Lyttleton, who contributes to WSC, used to work for it, I think - it was published down in Bristol (Future Publishing?) with a wave of other 'Total' titles like Total Film, all with the same glossy, brash, laddish approach to journalism that was epidemic in the 90s. I may be wrong on this, but I think they were interested in buying WSC at one point with a view to a merger. We could all now be reading Total Saturday.

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      #3
      Remembrance of mags past

      I used to buy 90 Minutes for about two years when I was at school, it seemed like a step up from Match and Shoot! Cannot even remember the name Total football.

      90 Minutes was the magazine that took me on to World Soccer and WSC so I do appreciate that.

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        #4
        Remembrance of mags past

        An old thread on this question.

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          #5
          Remembrance of mags past

          90 Minutes was edited by Paul Hawksbee, latter-day scriptwriter for TV Burp and TalkSport saving grace. It was specifically teen-orientated, no depth at all, but it was authentically funny in parts and rather good for what it was. There was a gap in the market there (kids too old for Shoot and Match, but too young for "serious" football writing) but I suppose FourFourTwo ate it alive. FFT has never been a good magazine, but it's very professionally put together and it understands the golden rule of publishing for teenagers: give your magazine the (superficial) air of being intended for adults.

          Total Football was the ultimate example of those doomed mags launched post-Loaded, the last gasp of optimism in magazine publishing. It served no purpose whatsoever, appeared to be aimed solely at people looking for "a football magazine" to read on the train, and was never going to earn the kind of loyal readership needed to survive more than a few issues.

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            #6
            Remembrance of mags past

            i thought this thread was going to about paul dalglish, stephen glass, darren mcdonough, daniel cordone, carl serrant, des hamilton, helder, david terrier, john karelse, and other assorted people that managed to play for newcastle in my lifetime without me remembering anything much at all about them.

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              #7
              Remembrance of mags past

              Antepli Ejderha wrote:
              I used to buy 90 Minutes for about two years when I was at school, it seemed like a step up from Match and Shoot! Cannot even remember the name Total football.

              90 Minutes was the magazine that took me on to World Soccer and WSC so I do appreciate that.
              Pretty much my experience with 90 Minutes as well. I think it finished when I was 18-19ish.

              My memory is that IPC magazines decided to launch a monthly football magazine in the vein of FourFourTwo (was it called 'Goal'?), using much the same writing staff, and that also got eaten alive by FourFourTwo as well. It didn't last more than two or three years.

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                #8
                Remembrance of mags past

                90 Minutes was great at first, when it was edited by Paul Hawksbee, in that it tried to be a Shoot!/Match for 16-30 year olds, with just the right level of humour/pisstaking, not to mention the fact that they were happy to do features with League Two clubs and League One players. Then the best writers (and editor Hawksbee) went off to form Goal magazine as a more grown up version of 90 minutes, only it ended up a little too blokey (but not as blokey as Total Football, which as Imp says, was terrible). I think Goal was the first to fold (as the market couldn't sustain three magazines, and FourFourTwo), and 90 Minutes (which was abysmal under Hawksbee's successor Eleanor Levy) went not long after, as it lost it's humour, lost it's interviews (to the monthlys), and ended up being more "feature" driven, only for the features to be pointless crap like "Second jobs players could do while they're injured" with Gianfranco Zola's face photoshopped onto a beefeater (and that would be the cover feature).

                FourFourTwo suffered a similar dip in quality when it changed editor (from being a mag that was aimed at football fans to being a mag where the idea was to sell whatever the latest produect that a Big Red player was promoting), much like Loaded went from being a magazine aimed at men from being a crap soft-core FHM-clone when James Brown stepped down.

                In fact, in terms of great 90s magazines, there seems to be a pattern of the quality falling off after the founding editor leaves, leaving their successor to try and stamp their own mark on the magazine, and failing.

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                  #9
                  Remembrance of mags past

                  I dimly remember another effort called Sweet FA, which was basically a footballing version of Viz.

                  It appeared briefly around early 1995, and was pretty shit. The cover of the first issue had a caricature of Cantona stamping on someone.

                  No second issue ever appeared, which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that one of the articles in the first issue had the not-at-all-libellous headline "DAVE BASSETT DOESN'T WANK INTO VACUUM CLEANERS".

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                    #10
                    Remembrance of mags past

                    Sweet FA lasted quite a while. There's a copy for sale on Ebay which is apparently the 1996 summer special.

                    If we're talking monthly magazines of the 90s, Match of the Day is worthy of a mention. Bland writing and very self-congratulatory as you would expect, although it did run Roy of the Rovers.

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                      #11
                      Remembrance of mags past

                      Surprised to hear that -- I never saw it again after that first issue. Not that I'd have bothered buying it, for it really wasn't very good at all.

                      Can't believe World Soccer is still in business. The features are incredibly sober and dull, the interviews are puff-PR jobs, and all the stats content can easily be obtained on the internet for naught.

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                        #12
                        Remembrance of mags past

                        I used to like 'Foul' magazine in the 1970's. It maintained a broadly irreverant tone, certainly in comparison to the likes of 'World Soccer' or 'Charles Buchan's Football Monthly'. A kind of proto-OTF if you will.

                        I recall that I used to like 'The Football League Review' (free with programmes at many grounds), too, but I think this may be nostalgia playing tricks.

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                          #13
                          Remembrance of mags past

                          The Onion Bag was a fanzine in the mid 90s that disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced, can anyone else remember it?

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                            #14
                            Remembrance of mags past

                            Anyone read that new glossy thing, I forget what it's called. I want to say Pretty Green, but that's Liam Gallagher's clothing label, isn't it? Green Soccer Journal? Christ, I don't know.

                            It's fucking terrible anyway. Written by people who don't really know much about football, I think. Or maybe they know fuck loads about football, and nothing about being a football fan.

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                              #15
                              Remembrance of mags past

                              I had an interview for a staff writer job at Total Football.

                              I didn't get it.

                              I really liked 90 Minutes, especially the weekly prediction bit - the Fools Panel, was it?

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                                #16
                                Remembrance of mags past

                                Due to my hoarding tendencies I've still got a big stack of 90 minutes somewhere, I remember that there were quite a few references to music in it. They also gave away good calendars.

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                                  #17
                                  Remembrance of mags past

                                  Antepli Ejderha wrote:

                                  The Onion Bag was a fanzine in the mid 90s that disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced, can anyone else remember it?
                                  Yes! I used to love the comic strips which took the piss out of Roy of the Rovers and other stories of that ilk.

                                  I used to buy FFT purely just for the 'Action Replay' feature which I thought was its only redeeming grace.

                                  I stopped buying World Soccer a few years back because, as AB says, it's not offering much that you can't get online for free. Hell, they even have Brian Glanville's column for everyone to access.

                                  It's a shame really, because World Soccer was a beacon of light in the pre-Internet era.

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                                    #18
                                    Remembrance of mags past

                                    90 Minutes was fairly decent in that it gave reasonable coverage to lower league players, although I have a hazy recollection they unaccountably loved Grimsby Town.
                                    I must confess I appeared in the Fools Panel one week, predicting scores horribly wrong.
                                    Pre-internet, WSC and it were my must have football mags

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                                      #19
                                      Remembrance of mags past

                                      Total Football was nothing like WSC! It was basically trying to be a lad's version of FourFourTwo as far as I can remember. Goal was alright, but merged/got eaten by with FFT after about five issues.
                                      The BBC MOTD magazine ran for a while, at various times as a weekly, fortnightly and monthly. As a 12 year old with no access to Sky or the televised MOTD, it seemed exciting and informative. In hindsight, it was generally bland. It did have Roy of the Rovers though, and a 'streaker of the week' feature. Other features included one where a female MOTD reporter would go out for dinner with a footballer. The News of the Screws would have handled that one a lot differently...

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                                        #20
                                        Remembrance of mags past

                                        Oh for the old league ladders made out of slotted card and tabs for the teams that Shoot used to issue each season....happy days in the 70's or what!

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                                          #21
                                          Remembrance of mags past

                                          henry wrote:
                                          Total Football was nothing like WSC!
                                          Probably why they wanted to buy it, or rather become it. I stopped writing for them when they murdered a feature at the subbing stage, claiming they did it for reasons of space. It ran alongside a half-page picture of Jim Smith that was irrelevant to the feature, just so they could make a pun about his baldness in the caption. Ha ha, look, he's got no hair!

                                          As you can see, freelancers nurse these grudges for a long time (about 12 or 13 years in this case). I wouldn't exactly say that I shouted Ha! when they went bust, but if you slash decent copy for the sake of a shit joke, then the gods of journalism will eventually punish you...

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                                            #22
                                            Remembrance of mags past

                                            'Match' magazine wasn't bad. Decent schoolboy fodder and the stickers were ace...

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                                              #23
                                              Remembrance of mags past

                                              I vaguely remember there being a slightly more recent magazine called "football punk", or something similar. There was once discussion about it on these very boards. I think the first issue had John Terry on the cover, which says it all really..

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                                                #24
                                                Remembrance of mags past

                                                I got a copy of Football Punk the last time I was in London. The name made me cringe and most of the magazine is devoted to fashion, babes, and more fashion.

                                                The only bright spot was an insert called "Retro Punk" that had a nice article on Clyde Best and interview w/ Ossie Ardiles.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Remembrance of mags past

                                                  My memory is that IPC magazines decided to launch a monthly football magazine in the vein of FourFourTwo (was it called 'Goal'?), using much the same writing staff, and that also got eaten alive by FourFourTwo as well. It didn't last more than two or three years.
                                                  Yeah, it was called Goal. It wasn't bad, actually. Not great, and not better than FourFourTwo, but it wasn't bad.

                                                  The one English football magazine, other than WSC, for which I have a special affection is Match Weekly, which I subscribed to in 1980 as a means of supplementing my English lessons in school. To me, English football seemed very exotic. Umbro and Admiral strips, programme collectors, players called San Cummings...

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