 | About Four Four Two Monthly Magazine
See below for the history of this magazine
Four Four Two Monthly Magazine launched in September 1994 and still runs today
An undated "Dummy Issue" was published with Kevin Keegan on the front cover. It had listing information about May -so was presumably created to check the market in May 1994 before a full launch in September.
Launch
Published by Haymarket Trade and Leisure publications, 38-42 Hampton Rd, Middx
Editor Paul Simpson
Founding Editor Karen Buchanan
Published every month at £2.10
2008
Published by Haymarket Publishing, Broom Rd, Middx
Editor Paul Simpson
Editor in chief Hugh Sleight
Published every month at £3.99
In July 1998 Goal Monthly incorporated into Four Four Two which was owned by IPC and Four Four Two is still owned by the Haymarket Group with the biggest circulation of the big three current football magazines of around 112,000 every month.
You can still order back issues from the Four Four Two website from issue 122 (October 2004) to the present day.
On this site you can order the first 110 issues which are no longer available elsewhere.
In the August 2014 they celebrated their 20th anniversary with the following interesting article:
FourFourTwo is born
Launch Editor Paul Simpson on the very first issue, starring El Tel and Jimmy Hill in shorts
"The test of a first-rate intelligence," the celebrated author F Scott Fitzgerald famously once observed, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still function. One should, for example, be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." That observation was uppermost in my mind as I convened, 20 years ago, the first editorial meeting to launch a magazine provisionally known as FourFourTwo. Most of the editorial team - myself included - had no experience of consumer magazines, and Haymarket (the publishing house) had never produced a football title. We had 12 weeks to pull it off. Daunted and doubtful, we did Fitzgerald proud. I had been editing another magazine - about the newspaper industry - for Haymarket and was asked to edit FFT because I was: a) reasonably well regarded, and b) cheap. If the launch failed I could soon return to my old job. Luckily, I had a brilliant, diverse team. Three women writers generated many of the features and ideas: Olivia Blair, Karen Buchanan and Amy Lawrence. Experienced art director James Baker quickly defined what came to be the iconic look and wrote the best headlines - mostly, alas, unprintable. For the Ian Wright cover interview, which graced the second issue, the line was: 'God speaks!' With some directors anxious about mixing football and religion, it yielded to "Ian Wright, Wright, Wright.' James was ably assisted by Alan Muir, an unflappable Scot who greeted every setback with a cheery "That's publishing!" The most common question I've been asked since that exhilarating, exhausting summer is: 'Why call it FourFourTwo?' The choice was much-debated internally - some preferred the anodyne Football Monthly - yet it worked. Magazine titles are, in part, a coded message to the audience you want to reach. In an age when formations were barely discussed in the press, FourFourTwo spoke to the kind of reader we hoped to attract: discerning, passionate, and with enough of a sense of humour not to cancel their subscription if we sent up their team or their idols. Nobody has since suggested a preferable alternative, although a Chinese publisher did tell me that in his country, the name sounds like "easy death". FourFourTwo launched in August 1994, with Terry Venables on the cover, Jimmy Hill modelling football strips and Barry Fry making a cameo appearance as a self-proclaimed cheeky fat bastard. It quickly became apparent that we had created a magazine that actually changed people's lives. That was, to use a Motsonism, "quite remarkable".
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