Cover Stories: English Football Magazine Cover Portrait Photographs 1950–1975

Abstract

Charles Buchan's Football Monthly and Goal were two mass-circulation football magazines. This comparative case study of the portraits of professional footballers featured on their covers in the first years of their publication, the early 1950s and late 1960s respectively, situates this type of football portrait photograph in its historical context, tracing its origins in art and early photography, as well as discussing the cultural and social influences which contributed to its changing format. Such photographs are considered not as isolated artefacts, but as part of a series or sequence in which significant periods of continuity or change can be discerned. The potential audiences for these visual images, as well as the ambiguities and complexities of discerning their interpretation and reception by contemporaries, are analysed. These photographs, it argues, alongside other sources, reveal how some of professional football's advocates, at specific historical moments, attempted to promote an elevated image of its protagonists as embodiments of a particular style of admirable working-class masculinity, the model professional.