 | About Match Weekly
See below for the history of this magazine
Match Weekly
Match is a weekly British football magazine aimed at the teenage and pre-teenage market. First published in 1979, the magazine had a circulation of 72,861 as of December 2009.
"The UK's best selling football magazine. MATCH magazine gives you the complete rundown on the Premier League every week, guaranteeing you all the latest news, match results and reports on YOUR favourite team."
Published by Emap Limited.
Match magazine was launched on 6 September 1979, at a cover price of 25p. The original editor was Mel Bagnall. Kevin Keegan was the first cover star of Match and supported the magazine with his column, Learn To Play The Keegan Way. The first issue came with an 80-page sticker album and included columns by Tottenham star Ossie Ardiles, Manchester United's Steve Coppell and Nottingham Forest manager, Brian Clough.
On its launch in 1979, the magazine initially failed to catch the dominant circulation of its main weekly football rival, Shoot. In the mid 1990s the magazine was successfully revitalized and relaunched by Chris Hunt, an editor with a wealth of experience in teenage music and sport magazines. Under his editorship Match was transformed, finally overtaking Shoot to become the biggest selling football title in Britain, with its weekly sales peaking at 242,000 during this period. This not only marked the highest point in the magazine's sales history (a record that still stands), but the high watermark of the British football magazine market in the 1990s. In the face of such market dominance by Match, during this period many of its rival titles either closed or, in the case of Shoot, changed frequency to monthly.
In February 2008 it became apparent that Match would once again face fresh circulation challenges when it was announced that the BBC would be launching Match Of The Day magazine into the weekly football marketplace and Shoot declared their intention to return to weekly publication, although this didn't last long as Shoot closed in June 2008.
A number of notable football journalists have started their careers at Match, including Mark Irwin of The Sun, Hugh Sleight of FourFourTwo, Paul Smith of The Sunday Mirror, Ray Ryan formerly with The News of the World and Rob Shepherd.
(Content from Wikipedia)
About Match Weekly magazines.
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