Football League Review
That little football magazine – with pictures by Peter Robinson
This exhibition provides an informal introduction to the Leicester based Magazine Football League Review across its brief lifespan in the late sixties and early seventies. Alongside spreads from the magazine are a selection of images by its lead photographer Peter Robinson.
Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson was described in an article in The Athletic, the New York Times’ sports magazine as the world’s greatest living football photographer. The claim reflects Robinson’s legacy as a photographer whose iconic images of the games and players sit alongside and almost anthropological visual study of the cultures that surround the beautiful game.
Robinson cut his teeth as the staff photographer on the Leicester based publication Football League Review, which is the focus of this exhibition. Having studied photography at Leicester School of Art, now DMU, he began submitting images to the magazine whose offices were just around the corner from the art school. His imagery for the magazine encompassed everything from the fairly traditional lexicon of action shots of matches to the supporters, and the impact football had on the fabric of the towns and cities in which it was played.
Robinson’s work sits as comfortably in the mass media press that it was originally commissioned for as it does in the context of contemporary art gallery. Though it’s subject is ostensibly football, and its sitters often household names such as George Best or Bobby Robson, his images are universal explorations of the complexities of human life, of triumph, greed, corruption and the power of community.
This exhibition, focussed as it is on Football League Review includes a small selection of Robinson’s photographs taken during his time at the magazine. This exhibition is an introduction to his work and its influence. In Autumn 2025 there will be a major solo exhibition of Robinson’s work at Leicester Gallery covering he full span of his extraordinary career.
Football League Review
It may have just been an inset included in club programmes but the Football League Review was no throwaway triviality. With its coverage of all four divisions and its willingness to tackle controversial issues, it became essential reading for many football supporters during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Football League Review was first published in August 1966, less than a month after England’s World Cup victory. It emerged out of an existing independent magazine, Soccer Review, based in Leicester and dedicated to the interests of, and distributed by, the clubs
themselves. Contact was made with the Football League’s Management Committee, which saw the opportunity of establishing its own official publication akin to the Football Association’s FA News and bankrolled the venture to the sum of £4,000. The newly named Football League Review kept the existing Soccer Review editor, Harry Brown, a sports journalist with the Leicester Mercury. Among the magazine’s original aims was to ‘play a big part in the modern, more intimate relationship between clubs and supporters’.
In its first season, the Football League Review was relatively poorly designed and amateur-looking, restricted to black and white photographs. It was also frequently criticised by sections of the press, which bemoaned its failure to ‘promote fresh ideas quite as vigorously as it denounces them’. For example, the Review endorsed League president Len Shipman’s view that clubs had to provide a competitive team first; improved amenities could come ‘from any money that is left’. It compounded this the following week by quoting Chelsea chairman Charles Pratt’s view that ‘If a world class team played on the local coal tip, people would crowd in.’
Within a couple of seasons, however, the Review had developed into a popular and influential publication. Regular features focused on the key stakeholders in the game – ‘Star Supporter’, ‘Fan of the Week’, ‘Terrace Talk’, ‘Man and Manager’ and ‘Ask the Ref’. Deputy editor Walter Pilkington contributed a statistical column entitled ‘Facts and Figures’ and, from 1968, BBC football correspondent Bryon Butler’s ‘Press Box’ column (later renamed ‘The Communicators’) summarised what the national and provincial press, radio and television were saying about the game.
Above all, however, the Review was a mouthpiece for the Football League, particularly its voluble secretary Alan Hardaker. Through the ‘League View’ column, Hardaker pontificated on the main issues of the day, presenting his own position as that of the Management Committee and the Football League more generally. Among the regular targets of his ire
were poorly behaved players and supporters, managers’ criticisms of referees and the perennial idea of a European ‘super league’. He also railed against what he considered inaccurate newspaper stories, and declared open war on some publications, such as The People, which had published a series of scurrilous articles attributed to a Stockport County player, whom it had dubbed ‘the Errol Flynn of Football’. Hardaker’s main objective was to protect the League and what we would now call its brand; or, in his own words, ‘to polish its image, the image of its clubs, and its players’.
A sober and serious read for the most part, the Review did include a series of more frivolous features. Among the best remembered were its polls to determine the best-looking players in the League. An ill-judged attempt to engage female readers, the idea was widely mocked but did generate considerable interest. Portsmouth full-back George Ley won in 1967/68 – with just over 40,000 votes – defeating Manchester United’s George Best by only three votes. Liverpool’s Emlyn Hughes took the title in 1968/69. A 1970 survey of soccer catering, meanwhile, revealed that, at Manchester City’s Maine Road, 8,500 cups of tea, 4,500 pies and 7,000 bottles of beer were consumed at an average match.
As much as anything else, however, it was Peter Robinson’s photographs, often striking and unusual, featuring varied aspects of the game’s culture alongside the more usual match action and team line-ups, that set the Review apart from other publications of the period.
At its height, the Review was included in the matchday programmes of around 80 of the 92 League clubs and boasted an average circulation of 400,000. Some clubs outside the Football League also offered it to their fans. Chelmsford City of the Southern League, for instance, began including the Review in its programme in 1968 ‘to keep our supporters in touch with the news for when we are eventually elected to the League’. Unfortunately, they never were.
Despite its wide readership, the Review struggled to stay afloat. It lost £92,000 in its first year and failed to make a profit until 1970. The Football League took over publication itself and, in 1972, rebranded it League Football. It was still losing money, however, partly because clubs were not charged the full rate for each copy and partly as a result of the improving quality of the club programmes that contained it. It finally ceased publication in early 1975, having reached 366 issues. For football aficionados and historians, it remains an insightful archive of the national game and a valuable document of its cultural imprint and social significance over a decade.
– Matthew Taylor, International Centre for Sports, History and Culture