The old ones are still the best
LEAGUE Ladders. You Are The Ref. If those terms mean anything to you then it is likely you are over 35 and that this Christmas you will surreptitiously slide a particular football annual into your shopping basket.
Not a club annual or a fanzine, mind. A proper annual, like the Shoot Annual 2006. You don't read Shoot? For shame. When there were only three or four live football games a year, Shoot was the bible.
Every week it carried player interviews, posters, questionnaires and other features designed to slake the thirst of football fans at a time when the footballers' version of Cribs was a distant dream. A particular favourite was You Are The Ref which, as the name suggests, put forward bizarre hypotheses and invited readers to adjudicate. ("If a player who is offside bounces the ball off the corner flag and thence into the net when the whistle is being lifted...")
The League Ladders were another popular feature. At a time when there were four divisions one to four, no Premiership or Championship malarkey readers received a giant poster for the bedroom on which they could hang the aforementioned ladders and move teams up and down the leagues as results dictated. It was laborious, the posters tended to fall off, often you'd lose one of the team inserts or it just fell to pieces, but Shoot must have been doing something right: League Ladders are still available to buy on eBay.
That sense of affection and nostalgia continues. When the magazine ran a 30th anniversary poll of its readers' favourite players in 1999, Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore were number six and seven.
It may surprise some of its old fans, then, to learn that Shoot lives on and is thriving.
Newcastle native Colin Mitchell spent years working at publishers IPC before eventually becoming editor of Shoot; he's aware of the heritage.
"As a kid I didn't have a huge interest in football, though I was aware of Shoot," he says. "Working for IPC, though, it's a realisation of something a bit special, being editor of Shoot. We my predecessors and I don't realise the heritage of taking Shoot on board, the brand is bigger than the magazine itself and the annual, it's got a huge fan base. Certainly any football fan who's 35 or over, you can guarantee they've read it.
"Nowadays our readers are at a different age, maybe 19 to 22, and we aim consciously for that in-between age. It's a very crowded marketplace and when Shoot was being repositioned the obvious gap was that middle market: the young football fans who were older than 14 or 15, but who are still too young for a coffee-table magazine."
In some ways Shoot was a success, and a victim, of its time. It began in 1969 Mitchell can instance several readers who still have pristine copies of the first edition in the general afterglow of England's World Cup success, and it surfed the feelgood factor generated by England's run to the semi-finals of the 1970 World Cup throughout that decade.
However, changes in the magazine's demographic ran in parallel with a general decline in football's appeal into the eighties. Difficult though it is to believe, rampant hooliganism and grim stadia meant there was a time the beautiful game wasn't quite as attractive as it is today.
The collateral damage for plenty of football-oriented publications proved fatal, and the Roy of the Rovers magazine, which incorporated comic strips featuring Roy Race and real-life football features, is a perfect example. It was first published in September 1976 and ceased publication in March 1993, was relaunched as a monthly in September 1993 for a further 19 issues and bit the dust in March 1995. The BBC Match of the Day magazine revived Roy as a comic strip story in May 1997 but that only lasted until May 2001.
Other football magazines didn't survive remotely as long as Roy.
Striker magazine appeared in 1970 and was incorporated into Inside Football within two years, Shoot's survival is all the more remarkable as a result, though it's worth pointing out that the demographic changes somewhat when it comes to the annual. Any bookshop habitué can see that the piles of Shoot 2006 tend to be raided by those approaching 40, not 20.
"It is a little bit different with the annual," says Mitchell. "You can have dads and uncles saying they've bought a Shoot annual for the sons or nephews, but everyone knows very well that it's the dad who wants it! Here in the office I get a good few annuals to give away, and when they come in you can see the older lads' eyes lighting up they can say that they're for their son, but it's for them.
"It's a fun annual. It's meant to entertain you on Christmas Day, something you take out of the stocking and have a flick through. It sells more copies than the magazine, so obviously it's gone from strength to strength. We brought it back in-house for production and there's been a fourfold increase in sales. It's a fun thing because we can be a bit cheeky pictures of lads who were young, with an Afro or something, and even the players have a laugh."
Shoot's unique selling point was largely based on player participation, so access to the stars is a vital component. Mitchell finds that the magazine's history is an asset today.
"We want to be serious with the players, and we want to have a laugh with players, not at them. If we can have a laugh with them, great, they're having a laugh with their pals. They know we're not trying to hang on them we don't have a news arm that's interested in where they're drinking, or who they're with or whatever.
"We find that once you say 'Shoot' it's the magic word they still read it. We often get the nod ahead of national and international magazines as a result. When a player says he'll do three interviews and he's given a choice of twelve outlets, then nearly always they'll pick us. We'll talk football with them, and just football, we're not interested in the off-the-field stuff."
A last hard-nosed question, then: whatever happened to You Are The Ref and the League Ladders?
"You Are the Ref disappeared in the 80s," laughs Mitchell. "People are always asking me about it. It was a very popular feature but it was long gone when I took over.
"The League Ladders were also scrapped about seven years ago, and I was contacted even today about them. Some of them are on eBay and so on, but a lot of them aren't full ladders because people were ripping out their favourite teams.
"That's the appeal of Shoot, and that old football scene. I heard recently about a guy who paid 20 quid for a poster ripped out of an edition of the magazine in the late seventies, just because it featured that great Crystal Palace side of the time."
Now you know what that rectangular shape in tomorrow's Christmas stocking will be.
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