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MAGNIFIED PÓG MO GOAL Póg Mo Goal is a fantastic
homegrown take on the world of soccer. We sat down in their dressing room with editors James Carew, Kie Carew and Edd Norval before they take to the pitch with their fifth issue. words Michael McDermott – You’ve just published issue five of Póg Mo Goal. Can you tell us the backstory and story to date of the magazine? Póg Mo Goal started out as a somewhat irreverent website focused on the Irish national team. But it evolved over time into something where we decided to indulge our passions and make something of substance and quality. We have backgrounds in art, graphic design, advertising and sports media and the natural step seemed to be producing a print issue. We were inspired by the likes of The Blizzard, Howler, and Mundial but also the fact that there was nothing coming out of Ireland. We started producing issues in newsprint format and the response was phenomenal, allowing us to give a platform to Irish writers and artists and at the same time, reach out to contributors around the globe who’ve worked with some of the biggest brands and who, when they saw we were Irish, were thrilled to be involved. Now on our fifth issue, the magazine has always been about design as much as content, something that looks as good as the writing inside. – You’ve changed format and paper quality for the new issue. What led to this? While we loved the newsprint and the design opportunities the size and format presented, we always wanted to move to something more collectable like a coffee table book or something you’d be happy to keep on the bookshelf. – We’re intrigued by the design decision to turn the contents page into the cover – what is the thinking behind it? 68 We wanted to have one graphic element on each cover that would stay the same on each issue and not be reliant on a cover star to push sales. After Issue One, we realised we could put the contents below the fold line as this was in effect wasted space, and as it was, our logo was getting chopped in half during the process of stocking the newspaper on shelves in our stockists. So, for Issue Two, we moved the contents to the front cover and its kind of become the signature now, that we feel isn’t just a gimmick, but has developed naturally to serve a purpose. – How do you source contributors? What is your submissions process? Over the years we have done a series where we asked designers from all over the world to produce a match day poster for Republic of Ireland games culminating in an exhibition as part of Offset. Through the previous issues and this poster collection, we’ve built up a network of like-minded independent illustrators, designers and writers who believe in what we are doing. Other times, we just contact people we admire and see how that goes. We never want the magazine to look better than it reads and vice versa. The quality of writing is as important to us as the design and we feel like some magazines seem to neglect the writing and it’s almost an afterthought of the magazine’s design process. – We’ve featured a few sports magazines in Magnified over the last 12 months, namely Racquet and Glory, there seems to be obvious parallels in your approach to theirs – namely, a deep dive into more tangential aspects of the sport in question, coupled with quality design, photographic and illustrative considerations. Does this invariably lead you down the path to being niche? Is there any prospect of long-term commercial viability and, if so, who inspires you in that field – or is it a proverbial labour of love? It’s definitely a labour of love, but with each issue we try to step up the outcomes. We’re always trying to tweak and evolve the design. I don’t think that a deep dive into sport or football needs to be niche, but it can be, depending on many other factors besides the magazine itself. The appetite for this type of magazine proves that people want to explore ideas in more depth, rather than what people assumed football fans wanted – tits and football. Having watched Asif Kapadia’s documentary on Maradona recently, we were drawn to the parallels between the abuse and taunts Napoli fans endured and your feature on Yugoslavian soccer which mirrored the spiral of ethnic and religious tensions. The terrace has often acted as a microcosm in which societal tensions and fractious relations are amplified, predominantly by heterosexual men. Has this changed in anyway, do you think, or is it just lying dormant? Football operates as primal scream therapy for a disillusioned contingent of society that, as part of a larger issue, is forgetting what it means to be human; losing connection; watching communities fracture and finding companionship