Soccerama

Soccerama is a UK-based 336-page quarterly football magazine/book, founded and edited by Hyder Gareth Jawád, which began life in October 2015. Soccerama, part of a growing portfolio of popular-culture and sport publications all produced and designed in the same style, is in the process of becoming a cooperative. Soccerama claims to be at the serious end of the journalism spectrum, with large, in-depth features, essays, interviews, and original research. The Soccerama idea is based on the editor's long-held ambition to create a football publication in the style of Granta.

Soccerama has the tagline "The Culture of Football". The second edition, Soccerama 02, was published in summer 2016, with printing taking place in London.

Jawád, a journalist, publisher and PhD student from Liverpool, England, has worked as a sportswriter and/or sub-editor for the Liverpool Echo (1990-99), The Times (1999-2001, on a full-time freelance basis), the Birmingham Post (2001-07, as chief sportswriter), and The Independent (2007-08, on a full-time freelance basis). Jawad won the Press Gazette's British Sportswriter of the Year for regional newspapers in 2005.

The first edition of Soccerama was published on October 21, 2015 and sold out its original print run of 512 test copies within three weeks. The editor described the initial print run as an "uncorrected proof edition; essentially, a demo to see the level of interest in such a publication". Having revised the first edition, the publishers produced a reprint in January 2016, which also sold out. The publishers initiated a third print run in February 2016.

The Soccerama raison d'être is to publish timeless, in-depth features about the culture, the politics, the people and places of football, with a mixture of historical research, travelogue, and interviews with figures of the modern game. There are also significant obituary and book-review sections. Soccerama has been compared with The Blizzard.

In the "mission statement" to the first edition of Soccerama, the editor states that the "publication [is] produced by one man, with one laptop, and one telephone, in one coffee shop, over a period of three months". The plan, however, is that, "in the fullness of time, the one-man band will become a forty-piece orchestra" - as and when budget increases allow.

The first edition contained the following features:

The editor welcomed readers to the first edition with an irreverent, self-deprecating introduction:

Intriguingly, for purely contextual reasons, the editor also published the original introductions to the first editions of other significant football magazines, such as Charles Buchan's Football Monthly, World Soccer, Soccer Review, Shoot!, League Football, Netstretcher, Match Weekly, When Saturday Comes, and The Blizzard.

Clive Toye, the former president of New York Cosmos, and the North American Soccer League, who is credited with taking Pelé to the United States in 1975, joined Soccerama as a columnist from the second edition. David Pleat, the former Nottingham Forest winger and the former manager of Tottenham Hotspur, Luton Town and Leicester City, began contributing to Soccerama from the second edition.

Soccerama 02 included:

Soccerama 03 began production in Auckland, New Zealand in November 2016.