Theme: Society & Culture | Content Type: Journal article

The Future of Football Fanzines: Have they Lost their Voice in this Digitalised and Deregulated Age?

Paul Breen and Paddy Hoey

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Nathan Rogers

| 1 min read

Football fanzines once stood at the vanguard of fan activism. Historically, they have served as the voice of supporters, largely independent of the clubs they are associated with. Indeed, a recurring characteristic of these fanzines is that they often challenge and question authority. In the halcyon days of past decades, they proliferated and often acted as a powerful vector of change within football. Increasingly though, they have been pushed to the margins, for a number of reasons, ranging from the increasing digitalisation of media to the growing distance between fans and club owners as a consequence of the money that's now in the game. Football's inexorable drift towards deregulation means that fanzines alone can no longer act as agents of change and challenge. They need to work in synch with supporters’ groups in order to make their voices heard. More than that, this needs to happen not just at a local, but a national level, so that supporters from top to bottom of English football's shaky pyramid are seen to speak with one voice. Perhaps above all, there is a need for independent regulation of the game's governance.

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    Paul Breen

    Paul Breen is a Senior Lecturer and Digital Learning Developer at University College London, author of books including The Charlton Men.

    Articles by Paul Breen
  • Screen_Shot_2016-03-04_at_12.47.54.jpg

    Paddy Hoey

    Paddy Hoey is a Senior Lecturer in Media Culture and Communication at Liverpool John Moores University.

    Articles by Paddy Hoey
Volume 96, Issue 3

Latest Journal

Volume 96, Issue 3

This issue features a collection titled 'The Intellectual and Political Legacy of David Marquand', who died in April 2024, edited by Colin Crouch, Ben Jackson and Peter Sloman. In this collection, authors including Jean Seaton, Will Hutton and Hilary Wainwright consider Marquand's legacy as a great progressive thinker, his biography of Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's first prime minister, and the role of socialism for Marquand. Other articles include a commentary by Deborah Mabbett titled 'Welfare reform by numbers'; Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams on 'The Vices of Values: Matthew Goodwin and the Politics of Motivation'; Helen McCarthy on 'Why the WASPI has no Sting: Gender, Generation and Pension Inequalities'; and Sam Taylor Hill, Tariq Modood and John Denham on 'Multicultural Nationalism: Saving the White Working Class from Blue Labour?' A selection of book reviews feature Edmund Fawcett's review of 'Nationalism: A World History' by Eric Storm and Samuel Cohn's review of 'Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid' by Sheilagh Ogilvie.

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