Feature: Sports Mags Market To Broaden With New Launches

A quick glance at a selection of current ads will confirm the fact that sport most definitely sells; possibly even more effectively than sex in the case of Premiership football. It is perhaps surprising, then, that there are currently no general sports consumer magazines on the market, with most publishers concentrating on specific sports or the health and fitness sector. This is about to change, however, as two new upmarket magazines dedicated to a range of sporting subjects are to try their hand in a new market.

The first, Line, comes from the publisher of upmarket lifestyle title Wallpaper and launched on Thursday last week. Line will become a quarterly title after its second edition is published in October and pre-empts the similar second launch into this market by NatMags’ Esquire. NatMags is to bring the Esquire spin-off sports mag ESQ to the newsstands in June and, along with Line, is hoping to bridge the gap between sport-specific titles and general lifestyle magazines.

Both publishers have spotted that there are no magazines in the country currently catering for the general sports fan in a lifestyle, high-quality consumer magazine format. “All the [more general] sports titles in the market at present concentrate on the practicalities of health and fitness,” says Esquire editor Peter Howarth. Of those which concentrate not on health, but on sports, all are sport-specific, as shown in the pie chart here.

Titles that have attempted to take health, fitness and sport in a lifestyle direction have all failed. Condé Nast’s GQ Active was effectively closed after two years in 1998 when it was folded back into its parent title, GQ. EMAP’s Total Sport closed at the end of last year when editor Paul Hamblin said that there was no market in the UK for a general monthly sports title. Another fitness/lifestyle title from EMAP, XL, closed less than two years after the company acquired it from Affinity Publishing. Yet another casualty was Haymarket’s Sky Sports, aimed at all sporting enthusiasts and covering a number of different sports, which folded just two months after launch in December 1996.

However, where these titles concentrated mostly on either teams and stars or health and fitness, both Line and ESQ, are coming at sport from a punter’s perspective. As Howarth says: “We want ESQ to have a broad appeal to people who like watching sport and perhaps play a game themselves every now and then, but with a sophistication that comes from the Esquire brand.” This approach has been successfully adopted in the US with titles such as Sports Illustrated but has yet to have been tried, tested and proven successful over here.