As English soccer becomes increasingly focused on money, weddings and celebrity wives, and less on the actual game, a new magazine aims to cash in on the decline of quality soccer journalism and lower the tone of the medium even further. ‘Football Punk magazine, owned by former Liverpool defender Phil Babb, is set to become a soccer magazine with no soccer content.
That, writes James Morrison, will include “at home with” interviews “that wouldn’t look out of place in [gossip mags] Hello! or OK!” Editor Ian Cruise claims that much of soccer media coverage is “fairly straight stuff from press conferences. What I’ve found is that, if you get footballers on to subjects other than who they’re playing next, they’re happy to talk about them.
“Phil went to have tea with [Portsmouth manager] Harry Redknapp and caught him very relaxed. It produced a lively, jocular piece. There’s a lot of stuff written about footballers as footballers, but this will be about footballers as people.” So look forward to Wayne Rooney’s critical appreciation of Verdi, Frank Lampard’s radical interpretation of the complete works of Soren Kierkegaard, and Joey Barton’s analysis of the geopolitical consequences of the Georgia-Russian conflict. All over a nice cup of tea by the pool.