Gareth Southgate is sitting opposite a reporter. Southgate is polite, bordering on gawky, which is just as well, as a less even-tempered man would not put up with this interview. The questions come not from the journalist’s notes, but from a large black holdall that contains various football shirts. Southgate is invited to rummage inside and pick a few out. The numbers on the back of the shirts correspond to questions sent in by readers.

“They could have been: ‘What car do you drive? What’s the strangest thing in your house? Or what’s your favourite colour?’” explains Adrian Curtis, the journalist with the bag. “It got pretty embarrassing.”

This wasn’t an awkward encounter in an FA spin room after England’s run to the World Cup semi-finals. It took place a quarter of a century ago. Southgate was still an up-and-coming Crystal Palace defender and Match, the magazine that employed Curtis, was changing the game.

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Such stunts were not part of football coverage before the early 1990s. When Curtis first joined the magazine in 1987, he was trusted with the number for a payphone inside Liverpool’s training ground. It was a world of landlines, easy access and slow news. “You could ring up Melwood ask for Stevie Nicol or whoever and he would come to the phone,” remembers Curtis.

“Or you would have players’ home numbers. You would know that if you gave them a call in the afternoon – after training in the morning – there was a good chance you could catch them. I remember speaking to Andy Cole when he was an unknown Arsenal youngster on loan at Bristol City and he told us how much he hated George Graham. And we could print it. There was no buffer of press officers or agents telling them what to say. It was a different time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Match grill Tommy Johnson on post-career plans, his experiences in the US and big lottery wins.

The endless reverb of 24-hour news and social media didn’t exist. Match and their rivals, Shoot, were among the very few publications covering the national game. Shoot, launched in 1969 under a masthead heralding “a terrific new football paper for boys”, was the original, better-funded title. The first edition of Match came out a decade later, in 1979, with Kevin Keegan the cover star. The younger magazine did not have the same backing or readership, but plugged away each week.

“All that changed when Match’s owners, Emap, decided they didn’t want to keep competing with Shoot,” explains Curtis. “Instead, they wanted to appeal to younger readers.” Curtis scored an immediate bullseye with the target audience. With play-by-mail football games still popular and new computer versions hampered by glitchy technology, he created a feature in which a fictional team’s fate rode on the reader’s answers to multiple-choice match scenarios. He and his colleagues produced a made-up squad, adopting pseudonyms and posing outside Peterborough United’s London Road Stadium. The deluge of mail that followed as readers submitted their results each week meant the feature ended up with its own secretary.

Ultimately, though, Curtis grew tired of the gimmicks. He was one of several members of staff who hankered after a more grown-up audience, swapping sides to join Shoot in 1993 as deputy editor behind another former Match staffer, Dave Smith.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The team behind Shoot magazine introduce themselves to readers.

Match’s new ethos needed fresh blood. Chris Hunt, who had previously worked on teenage music and lifestyle magazine Rage and rap magazine Hip-Hop Connection, became editor after Curtis. “I was hired to help connect more with kids, to give Match an authentic voice teenagers could relate to and that pre-teens could aspire to,” he says. “We took the readers into the lives of the footballers. We were just as likely to ask them about the clothes they wore as the football they played.”

Tom Fordyce was one of a raft of young writers who followed. “I was still at university when this little advert appeared in the Media Guardian,” he recalls. “It was like the famous NME one requiring ‘hip young gunslingers’ – all it asked for was a passion for football and 10 ideas, no previous experience necessary. I thought it would be work experience but I was actually paid £250 a week. This was at the point when I was doing £3.50-an-hour gigs in fruit-packing factories. There was a whole lot of us, about the same age who were still fresh and had fun in us. What we tried to do with Match was make a Smash Hits for football.”

Straight news was old news and Match morphed into a neon splatter of off-beat features, loaded with pictures and proto-lad humour. There were cheerfully posed photo tours of players’ houses. Pre-season portraits were transformed into gargoyle caricatures by mirroring one half of a player’s face. “Scales of Justice” was a joke column in which Liverpool and England defender John Scales would apparently give his verdict on a big pop culture issue; similarly the “Juke Box Durie” column featured Scottish striker Gordon Durie offering “his” opinion on the latest releases.

Matchman – a cartoon character – romped around the pages, giving his forthright views on music, fashion and, occasionally, football. Match Facts – an in-depth statistical breakdown of the week’s results with individual player ratings – remained in the centre pages, but everywhere else the hunt was on to capture Generation X’s stuck-at-home younger sibling. It worked.

Shoot was soon overhauled. By 1996, Match was selling more than 200,000 copies a week, almost double the number achieved by their rivals, who were reluctant to abandon the old formula. “It was quite a bitter rivalry,” reflects Hunt. “Shoot had a bit of a tendency to follow what Match did, copying ideas wholesale and poaching staff from Match too, hoping to replicate the formula. It just reassured us that we were doing something right.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alan Hansen tells all to Match readers.

Match’s pitch to younger readers was perfectly timed. In the late 1980s, football had been in danger of becoming a backwater bypassed by the mainstream. English teams were out of Europe, their fans dwindling and demonised. But a reboot after Italia 90 and the rush of Murdoch millions into the Premier League meant that football was scrubbed up and ready to met the family once more come the mid-1990s. And the players themselves were changing.

“We were always asking them about the last album they bought or getting them to show off their CD collection,” says Fordyce. “Around 1995 or 1996 it started to change. Before then it was the classics – Phil Collins, Lionel Ritchie, Rod Stewart. I remember David Unsworth – bearing in mind he was in his early 20s as well – telling me he had just bought the new album by Jon Secada. They were so straight down the line.

“But then R&B culture started kicking in. I remember Michael Duberry and Frank Sinclair referencing some US artists. Indie emerged and the dance scene blew up, with players dropping the names of clubs and different nights. Danny Dichio became a bit of a DJ and soon every player whose house we toured would want that classic photo of them with a set of headphones and two Technics decks, even if they had no idea how to mix. It did feel like the most amazing time and job. I left university straight into the summer of Euro 96 and Oasis at Knebworth. I couldn’t believe that everyone was into the same things I was and I was lucky enough to be working on them.”

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Ultimately, Match was left high and dry by a combination of technology and demographics. A swaggering slew of mega-magazines had emerged in Britpop Britain, with the likes of FHM and Loaded also racking up big sales. But it was at the younger end of the market that the pinch on print was first felt. Their readers rushed online and by 2010 they were only selling 25% what they had shifted at their mid-1990s peak. The magazine still exists, but only just: fewer than 20,000 copies are sold each week.

The internet has radically altered the media landscape but for many kids growing up in analogue-era, small-town Britain, Match magazine was like a Now That’s What I Call Football compilation: an incongruous, colourful mass-market mix that was the perfect primer for the scene. “I remember sitting with Loaded editor James Brown at Wembley for England’s opening game of Euro 96,” says Hunt. “Match was ripping up trees and I had a long conversation with James about how Match, in its own way, was as innovative as Loaded. He certainly got it.” And every week, in their local newsagents, so did hundreds of thousands of the nation’s youth.

• This is an article from The Set Pieces

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