190 x 260 mm, 100 pages

London, UK

Quarterly

First published 2014

Editor-in-chief: Asad Raza

Art director: Alex Currie

‘Reminding you why you love football’

With another controversial World Cup on the horizon, following the Qatar-hosted 2022 instalment, our favourite football magazine is back, and in surprisingly high spirits: ‘Ticket-gouging, fixture bloat; the US being at war with every single country on this planet. But, regardless of all of that, all of the noise and negativity, we wanted this issue to prove that the World Cup can still be a powerful force of good, that there are silver streaks in the massive, thermonuclear cloud. Brilliant stories, human stories, stories that can make you smile.’ This is the World Cup Special!

An ode to the all-American, sun-soaked ’94 tournament gets the ball rolling this issue, followed by the ‘World Cup of snacks’—New Zealand’s Pascall Pineapple Lumps are a strong contender, but it’s Mexico’s Pulparindo Mango Tamarind Bar that takes home the gold. At the centre of the issue, readers will find a 14-page spread dedicated to the tournament’s beloved and bemoaned ‘Heroes & Villains’, immortalised on the cover. Elsewhere, Pancho Monti keeps the score, documenting the Argentinian workers who kept Buenos Aires running whilst the rest of the country ground to a halt at the pinnacle of the 2022 World Cup; Andy Headspeath pays homage to Gareth Southgate, whose 2021 ‘Dear England’ letter for The Players’ Tribune gave football fans a reason to be proud to be English; Ella Benson Easton reports on Latino football communities across the US; Andrew Martin searches for the perfect formula for a World Cup hit single; and a defiant fashion editorial spotlights African models from three of the upcoming tournament’s participating nations, rejecting the flattening of nationhood by corporate entities. 

On the Journal
At work with editor Dan Sandison: ‘We’d had quite a few offers from weird and wonderful organisations to buy us out over the years, and we’d pretty consistently turned them down. This felt different though, they were publishers and football people. We got on. Fast forward six months and we are working on a magazine for the first time in about three years… It’s been a long time in the making, and we are all made up to be back.’
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