This is Leeds getting absolutely tonked in 1992 by the Borough.

Yes.

4-1.

The champions, Leeds United, no less.

The last champions of the old first division.

Because this was the first, it was the autumn or late summer of the, in fact, it was summer, wasn't it? It was August this goal of the first Premier League season.

So I think it was our second home game.

Yeah.

the protagonists, and what was the production process? 'Cause I can imagine there's, like, staplers [laughs] and photocopiers involved.

Yeah.

All, all of that.

So there, there were early fanzines in the '60s and '70s, but the real movement I'm talking about here is, is '82, '83-ish, um, York very precisely.

Terrace Talk, one of the earliest club fanzines, if not the earliest, and then City Gent in Bradford.

They, you know, um, they, they really started it off.

There were other club ones at that time.

... football print media exists at this time beyond matchday programs and When Saturday Comes and that, like, I guess?

But the fanzine before the era of the internet and social media and domination of football by people who are not football fans, it was this emergence of something that was quite... idiosyncratic at the time, which was a homemade DIY magazine yeah it starts with pump for me but actually yeah in your book uh daniel you're saying it starts in terms of football with celtic uh as way back

as 1963. yeah the the there's a lot of research being done on fanzines in in the last year or so there was a big exhibition at leeds library and as part of that they discovered this early prototype fanzine in the early 60s then of course you might have heard of foul in the 70s which was a bit of an inspiration for when saturday comes You have to have parameters with these things.

So I concentrated really on the mid-80s through to the mid-90s, the really key period.

But they were certainly even before the punk fanzines, yeah.

And as punk fanzines died away and punk music died away in the early 80s, the football fanzines started to take over in the mid-80s.

And that was... really that mushroom because of the horrors of 1985 really and the hideous way fans were were treated and the things things that happened heisel bradford and other incidents so they came out of a time of such doom when when football supporters were so demonized and they wanted to say look we're not all hooligans we're not all like that in fact most of us aren't and one of the great lessons of research i went through 8 000 fanzines or so i interviewed more than 40 editors and others this lesson of solidarity that we i think as football fans certainly in britain we've lost that between look at kickoff times look at all the things we moan about now at 12 30 kickoffs we don't we still go to matches and we still we don't demonstrate together or anything they do in germany but back then you had the anti-racism you had the anti-id cards Fans together across clubs, it's so tribal now that it felt unimaginable almost as I read these acts of unity and solidarity.

I've got,

there's a whole chapter in the book about it because it was, I found it so heartening how ahead of the time, actually, ahead of their time, a lot of fanzines, right, so vehemently anti-racist.

Oh, yuck

... of the official matchday pro- There's swearing in it after all.

Gary Parkinson missed a penalty.

Someone hoied a fanzine forward, a Fly Me to the Moon, and I won the scramble with several, among several other kids and, and got that copy of Fly Me to the Moon.

Cradled it, hid it in my coat, looked at the cartoons and the swearing on the way home, and just fell in love with that, the, the naughtiness of it all.

And that developed into my teens.

I would always buy Fly Me to the Moon and other clubs' fanzines when I would visit them.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel, in a way, does it unite the team and the fans?

It's a wonderful moment w- whether it's in club football when, or, or international football, when fans and players break the fourth wall that is the advertising hoardings and have this bonding moment because you have this strange relationship where, you know, they [laughs] they're not your mates or anything.

You really love them.

It's, [laughs] it's uncontrollable, and it's, it's quite disturbing at times.

And you don't get much back from them, and that's fair enough.

But when you have these moments, these anthems, you know, you get it in club football, Man City doing Blue Moon, uh, Delilah at Stoke, Goodnight Irene at Bristol Rovers, all of these anthems.

We don't really know why they ended up being so, but those moments of, of bonding are incr- are just an incredible, rare, but wonderful thing.

And other examples, I suppose, national examples.

And some come out really quite badly.

I try so hard to be positive about places, especially having affection for the town of Middlesbrough and the area of Teesside that was regularly top of these crap towns lists and things in the early 2000s.

And I really do try and look at the best of places, which is probably why I often delve into the industrial history and from when they had... a bit more about them I suppose but I tried my best with Luton and I did tease out some affection for certain areas of Luton but I was also coloured by what happened when I was at Kenilworth Road which was I had as always my notepad and pen with me and a steward approached me and said what are you doing and questioned me at some length during the game and he said to me people write bad things about us what are you writing I don't have to tell you what I'm writing I can bring a a notebook and pen to a match.

Of course I can.

And at that moment, I thought this chapter, unfortunately, isn't going to have a very positive tint to it all because of the man treating my Bic Biro as an offensive weapon.

So, you know, I tried to be fair with Luton and I did have... letters or emails rather afterwards from Luton fans wanting to discuss rather than shout at me and I had found the club in a bad place as they were put in certainly we know that now because the last five years there albeit they're in the third tier at the moment have been fantastic as a club for Luton so I don't think that was a tremendously positive chapter and hopefully I was Generally teasing positivity out of other places, though, and I fell in love with Sheffield really, again, to embrace the city's football history, everything it pioneered in the game and the musical history as well, made me love Sheffield and see it in a way I hadn't before.

And a lot of these journeys are...

In your opinion, when clubs do shift from traditional old crumbling stadia to bright new shiny stadia, what is the impact on the town and the club when these things happen?