by Seán Creedon

Fifty years ago two friends decided to launch a new soccer paper that had features on the League of Ireland, international and junior soccer.

Alan Dalton and John Grant were old friends who had played soccer together with YMCA in Sandymount, Dublin. Alan worked as compositor in the Irish Times, while John owned an engineering supply company. A loan of 1,000 pounds from a bank manager in the AIB in Donnybrook got them started and they launched Soccer Reporter in October, 1975.

Back in 1975 there were no mobile phones or apps and junior soccer players depended on the Evening Press and Evening Herald in Dublin and Evening Echo in Cork to get their fixtures for the weekend. The three evening papers also carried photographs and match reports from the previous weekend’s games.
Shoot! was a colourful English weekly aimed at young readers. For more mature readers at that time there was World Soccer and Football Monthly.

Soccer also got good coverage in the four Irish morning and three evening papers. There were also Irish editions of several English tabloids with blanket coverage of soccer at a time when we had huge sales of newspapers in this country. But there was no publication catering exclusively for junior and League of Ireland football and that’s where Soccer Reporter filled a void.

The first broadsheet issue costing 15 pence was published in October, 1975, and the stories on page one had reports on how our three League of Ireland clubs in Europe that season, Athlone Town, Bohemians and Home Farm had fared.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own