LAST YEAR [2024] Leeds Central Library put out a call asking for volunteers for a project on Football Fanzine Culture called Voice of the Fans. Manna from heaven for me, retired, time to burn, what more could you ask for?
Our first meeting at the Leeds Central Library was an eye-opener, the librarians laid out what they had and the problem they faced. Firstly, they had a lot of stuff and secondly, they didn’t fully realise what they had.
Step forward some slightly ageing volunteers who droned on for an hour about what fanzines meant to football fans and why it was such an important part of the 1980s and 1990s… Protest, humour, the fan’s voice, a dramatic change in culture, all of these and more on the pages of scruffy, some might say amateur-looking magazines and pamphlets disguised as fanzines.
We quickly structured the project into themes and set to work. My role was to look at historical context and the voice of the fan before fanzines, a role which (un)fortunately involved the incredible microfilm archives in the library (incredible because THERE ARE MILES AND MILES OF IT!) Leeds Central Library has copies of newspapers going back well into the 1800s, every single page, every single day.
Unfamiliar with microfilm? You clearly haven’t lived. A reel of film which has the imprint of a month or two of EVERY page of a newspaper, usually in negative form. So, you scroll, manually on some machines, with no indexing or search feature, you just have to scroll, stop, scan.. over and over.
We focused on dates that might have interesting information, Leeds City, the Herbert Chapman years, the fall of City, formation of Leeds United and post-War football, fan letters in the following decades up to the time football fanzines really arrived in the 1980s. This still took months but revealed some incredible aspects of the history of football at the time.
It quickly got to the point where we already had way too much for the small part of the exhibition historical context would take. So, one day as we were talking about the sheer number of fanzines there used to be in Leeds and Bradford and Yorkshire and nationwide, I started to think.. and then I started to search.
Months later the answers would turn out to be:
17 (with 1 joint Leeds/Arbroath joint fanzine),
12 (9 for Bradford City, 3 for Park Avenue!)
111 (Not including Middlesbrough but including Scarborough and District League Division Three side Thornton Le Dale … 1,691 so far!
We have created a monster, a list of all the football fanzines that existed in the British Isles with a couple beyond that for good measure. Like any good list it’s more than that, it details all sorts of obscure facts about the fanzines and so blogs were mentioned.
Wimbledon fanzine Wombles Downunder came to my attention thanks to the internet, it popped up quite quickly and it stands out for several reasons.
Wombles Downunder clearly fits the independent criteria we apply (no club funding, guidance and run by volunteers) and it’s a classic zine, a mixture of interviews, history, humour, protest and general grumbling!
There are several fanzines that are remote from their subject, Ørneblikket is a Norwegian Crystal Palace fanzine for example but Oslo to London is a mere 1,078 compared to the 10,559 miles distance from Sydney to Wimbledon so Wombles Downunder is without doubt the furthest away any fanzine is from its subject.
Then there is longevity, Wombles Downunder is 39 years old and though it’s far from the oldest fanzine it’s in the top 10 — fourth oldest in terms of still active zines and roughly speaking (we’re still finding zines) you were about the 38th to start.
I’d also have to say that Wombles Downunder should get some kind of award for most resilient fanzine, the ups and downs of the club are well documented so bravo for continuing through all that but even before that printing, stapling and posting (POSTING!!) fanzine from the other side of the planet to willing subscribers was quite a feat.
Though some people think that fanzines have to be printed I’m not amongst them, as long as a fanzine WAS in print form it’s in. There are plenty of zines today that are online or offer pdf as an option.
If football fanzines hadn’t exploded in numbers in the late 1980s the landscape we look at, the grounds were attend and the fandom we exist in would have been very different.
There is so much more to be revealed in the exhibition at Leeds central library from May 9 to August 10 this year [2025] covering this incredible era in football and publishing.
It is very much not Leeds-focused but a celebration of fanzines, protest and the voice of the fan across the British Isles.
Watch out for news of events, come along and join us in the library and we hope you’ll enjoy the blogs which will appear here:
https://footballfanzineculture.blog/
If you wish to take out a subscription to Wombles Downunder go to https://www.wdsa.com.au/become-a-member/
