World Soccer

WSM is one of the best and longest running international football magazines. The title reflects pretty much its aim, except that they annoyingly use the word 'Soccer' instead of football, despite the publication being British and having little to do with the U.S. Oh well, it's a corporate world we live in, so I suppose we just have to accept that fact.

I began buying World Soccer magazine around the turn of the Millennium, when avid football fans may realise, that Italian league football (Series A) was taken off our screens. Being in the pre-Sky digital era, I was forced to keep up-to-date on the latest happenings by course of this excellent monthly publication.

The magazine always profiled a singular player at the front. This would usually be the player who was the most famed or publicised player at the time of printing. Hence, going down the years, almost every great player of any era had appeared on the front of World Soccer Magazine. The first page as I remember it always contained a small introduction by the Editor (esteemed writer Gavin Hamilton) outlining the focus of the current edition of the magazine.

The great thing about this magazine is that it has every inch of the globe covered. If there is a meaningful football match played anywhere at any time, you will find it somewhere in the WSM. Of course the magazine gives greater emphasis on the more established leagues (England, Spain, Italy and Germany etc..). The whole purpose of the magazine is to look at football with a more strategic and analytical look. There are many interviews from major footballing stars who are always quizzed on more serious issues of the game (and not on stuff like hairstyles and cars).

One of the main features was team of the month, when the magazine's experts would get together and judge the best 11 players from all of the leagues (across Europe). Why is this a good feature? Well, ask any football fan, and they will tell you they know better than any manager about team selection. However, we often think we know more than we actually do, so this feature has a lot of us eating humble pie.

The quality of journalism is really high, and there are few columns that you read that have you thinking 'what is he on about?'. The magazine has a feature profiling young footballing prospects. I can remember many of today's top players (Ronaldinho and Messi etc.) appearing in this section before I had ever heard about them.

There are a few criticisms that can be made of WSM. However, many of the drawbacks of the magazine do not lie within their control. As with nearly all series publications, the internet has made magazine such as this lose much of its appeal. Why wait for a month when you can get instant information from around the globe, and for free all on the net. The content can seem a bit outdated; in particular the reviews of particular tournaments. Which often appeared a month after they had been completed, and usually were long forgotten (Like World Cup 2006, anyone still remember that? Oh yeah England lost!).

The magazine has increased in size of the years, and unsurprisingly in cost as well. Some may see the magazine as quite small given its cost (around 3 pound a copy), but it only concentrates on high quality articles and features, so this is not surprising.

Regardless of the impact of the internet, this magazine has stood the test of time, and it has still managed to stay popular. It has high quality features every month, and it keeps you up-to-date with the latest happenings in world football.

World Soccer is an outstanding read, mainly for thinking adults.