Interview With Andy Lyons
The editor and co-founder of When Saturday Comes talks
to Sean O'Conor
"When Saturday Comes" began when two friends in England in the
mid eighties brought out a photocopied fanzine.
Twenty years on it is widely regarded as the most intelligent football
magazine in the world and they have just published a unique and
real fans'-eye encyclopedia of the game entitled "The Half Decent
Football Book".
Soccerphile caught up with founding editor Andy Lyons, to talk
about the new book and reflect on two decades of groundbreaking
football writing.
What did you set out to do with this book?
The idea was to avoid a straightforwardly factual account of football
history, the sort of stuff that is covered already in reference
books. We wanted to offer more a personalized view of football and
specifically British football clubs' development as a part of popular
culture in the UK.
How did you put it together?
We asked a number of our individual contributors to submit stuff
and we approached those who had written articles on their specific
clubs. We started with a list of clubs and headings and went from
there.
It also arrives 20 years after WSC was founded. Was that
on purpose?
No, that was coincidental. We had this planned two and a half year
ago although it is good that it has come out now because in a way
it is for the most part for football fans who were fans before football
became the fashionable thing it has been in recent years. The magazine's
default position is that we tend to be fairly skeptical towards
most of what is coming out of football these days. It seems to be
something cyclical going on in that people were complaining about
things concerning football when we began and they are again now.
WSC has evolved as well as football then?
Well we felt like defending football when we began in the mid eighties
because it had a bad public image in the wake of Heysel. It was
seen as a law and order issue by the government and viewed as something
overrun by hooligans from those outside the sport.
We were in our early twenties at the time and familiar with the
music press responding to the interests of 'people like us' but
there was nothing in the football press of equivalence. There were
magazines like 'Shoot' and 'Match' for the younger age group and
a few fairly bland mainstream ones for the older fans which were
more like football programmes so we were aiming to do something
that would hopefully resemble the kind of conversations people had
about football before games, covering funny stuff, theories and
so on but always as fully informed about the game as fans are.
We kept that position for several years but in recent times given
the explosion in media interest in football, the sport has almost
become too big and not on a human scale anymore. It can't really
sustain the amount of attention being heaped upon it so we are kind
of saying 'it was nice when it existed and benefited the people
involved in it and without wanting to sound retrogressive, it would
be better if football got back to being what it was.'
Every WSC editorial now seems drenched in a "skeptical loyalty"
to the game but you can only be honest about what is going on before
your eyes.
It is a difficult line for us to take because obviously it would
be a bit bizarre to produce a magazine when we are don't actually
like the subject matter we are writing about so we have to steer
a careful course but the reason we are critical is because we are
so interested in the game.
We care about football and we feel it could be run so much better.
It is ludicrous that there are huge amounts of money being thrown
around at the top level and at the other end there is a perpetual
list of clubs in danger of going out of business but the sport has
a historical tradition of phenomenally bad organization.
How has the identity of the English football fan changed
over those twenty years?
The Premiership is coming to be seen almost as a different sport
and a lot of people feel you can follow Gillingham or Crewe or whoever
as well as have a favourite from the top three, so what is happening
increasingly in England is what has been going on in Holland, Portugal
and to an extent Scotland, in that fans are supporting their local
team as well as one of the big clubs. You see kids in provincial
towns wearing replica tops of Chelsea or Man Utd more than you did
ten years ago for instance.
A lot of fans have been priced out but attendances have also
shot up. Are these new fans yet to experience what we consider the
reality of being a football fan?
There is a fear that the newer fan who got interested in the game
as a TV event might eventually switch over to something else. If
you follow Arsenal or Man United and say they have a bad season
and don't qualify for the Champions League then you wonder whether
a number of those fans might tail off. I was talking to a young
man who works in an architectural firm that is adjacent to our offices
the other day and when I said I work for a football magazine he
told me he was a Spurs fan and then he asked me 'How are we doing?'It
is as if you feel obliged to say you support so and so these days
but ten years ago you would not have.
I used to feel in a minority and enjoyed a kinship with fellow
'inductees' in the brotherhood but that has all changed.
That is right. It was a badge of honour but also something to be
slightly ashamed of or apologetic about in the '80s. It has gone
the other way now and I find myself agreeing with people's lists
of reasons why they don't like football. I can see both points of
view.
WSC is still the first stop for quality football journalism
but why do you think Simon Kuper failed to establish intelligent
football writing in this country?
I think 'Perfect Pitch' stopped because the publishers had a specific
idea of sales which were not met. Maybe if they had persevered it
might have become a sustained thing and his onefootball.com website
at least became a launching pad for a number of young journalists,
some of whom contribute to WSC.
Will WSC survive? You were asking for donations from readers
not long ago.
We had a rough patch six or seven years ago for various reasons,
one of which was a huge council tax bill and going to colour at
the time when there was a boom in football magazines like '4-4-2'
which came out in the wake of the 1994 World Cup.
For a little while we were being squeezed off the shelves because
we did not have the money to spend on promotional budgets. We were
also small in the sense of being a 48 page periodical competing
with glossy 120-page magazines.
What happened was that there turned out not to be the room in the
market for three or four titles on the same subject. They were too
similar. '4-4-2' survived because of its head start on the others
and their demise helped us to redefine ourselves as a niche magazine.
That period gave us a clearer idea of who are readers were and what
we could and could not be.
Your foreign coverage is also exceptional.
We are mindful that there is a lot of media coverage of foreign
football around so we have to make sure we cover it from a certain
angle and not just replicate 'World Soccer'. There is no point purely
giving out facts because fans will just go to websites to get that
information so we have to find a reason for writing what we do.
You also use a large bank of writers and it seems a lot of
non-professional ones.
Yes, we have built up a network of individuals who report on clubs
now so there is less reliance on unsolicited pieces than ten years
ago but I would say still in every edition there is a piece by someone
who has not written for us before.
If it remains somewhat a lone voice in England, did WSC nevertheless
inspire any overseas football media?
The fanzine thing that happened here was replicated to a large extent
in Germany where the national fan culture is fairly similar to England's.
In other countries where there is more of an ultra culture with
hooligan style fanzines it has not happened.
'Elffreunde' is our nearest equivalent and that developed out
of the German network of alternative fan magazines much like 'WSC'
came from and was closely linked to the fanzine boom in England
of the mid '80s. There is also one in Sweden called 'Offside' and
one in France called 'So Foot'.
I thought the English fanzine boom of the 80s was a wonderful
time. Was it just the internet that largely killed it off?
Pretty much. Fanzines now have largely moved on to the web as it
is easier to do an interactive thing with message boards and daily
updates than a once a month thing. Fans can also contact each other
more easily via a website and editors can reach their target audiences
more easily. That said there are some still going such as Bradford
City's 'The City Gent' which actually predates 'WSC' but I think
a lot of the guys who used to do fanzines now put their energies
into websites.
I do miss that avenue of fanzines in 'Sportspages' and the
huge listings you used to have in your magazine.
It was great as it was a genuine underground culture. As what happened
with music, a lot of it was then appropriated by the mainstream
and even if I don't like them, shows like "Soccer AM" or "Fantasy
Football" are like mainstream versions of fanzine culture.
Did you ever feel threatened by the internet?
We looked into developing the website but we have a small staff
and we did not think it would have been financially viable to pay
someone to spend hours a day putting things on the internet. We
do have the message board of course www.onetouchfootball.com
where fans talk to each other. There was also the question of making
it distinctive enough with so many websites out there. The fact
we have been going a long time and are recognizable on the news
stands helps us continue as we have been without the need for being
completely online as well.
What were the highlights for you of the past twenty years?
A personal highlight would be back in about our third issue just
after the 1986 World Cup when someone wrote in to say that John
Peel had read something out from the magazine that I had written
on his show and sent us a tape of it. I remember sitting down with
fellow editor Mike Ticher, whom I shared a house with, and listening
to that tape.
It was nationally-focused but still a fanzine really?
We just Xeroxed the first issue but then when we sent a copy to
Phil Shaw who wrote about football for the 'Guardian' and the following
Tuesday we had about 250 letters so we had to do a reprint. That
first mailbag made us think there was something in this although
we did not make it a full time occupation for a couple of more years.
But we certainly felt a sense of connection and realized there were
like-minded people all over the country.
It remains as important as ever for fans to have a voice.
And I think what form that takes changes. At a national level there
are supporter-led organizations, ones attached to clubs and things
like Supporters Direct. Then at a localized level there are fanzines
and websites which represent the people who go to games. The important
thing is that fans continue to feel they are participants in football
and more than consumers. The general trend has been to push supporters
into being people who purchase a dish to watch football at home
or go to the pub to watch it and buy products in the process, stays
at home and passively consumes a thing they are being told is the
greatest league in the world. The lower down the leagues you go
the greater the sense is of people literally involved in running
their clubs. The fan as participant is a vital element in helping
to keep football flourishing. If that were to get lost then the
game would be in deep trouble.
However much we may dislike the Premiership, surely we need
to keep the football world together somehow?
I think the difficulty always is and especially in relation to the
Championship, that lower leagues cannot ever have a sense of collective
purpose since a lot of the teams do not want to be there. They just
want to be in the Premiership playing Man United and Arsenal. In
a way the fact Chelsea is dominating so much may turn out to be
a good thing as it will expose the ludicrousness of letting money
rule it all. If they win everything forever then it will look grotesque
and then we can all say 'well this is what is has come to' and then
say what everyone is thinking about Abramovich but cannot really
say at the moment.
Is the horizon bleak for the Beautiful Game?
No, there are always lots of encouraging things. Outside the Premiership
crowds are big and in general fan culture is in a fairly healthy
state in terms of supporters' trusts and the like. There will always
be things to react against, things that are wrong in the game and
the proliferation of media does allow fans to express their views.
As long as there are outlets for fans to express their opinions,
that is the main thing.
When Saturday Comes & WSC Books
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