The players are on the beach now. Most of them have been for a while haven't they? The Southampton lads are starting to look like Joan of Arc they've been on it so long. The kit designers have done their bit and clocked off too. It's been a slog for them this year to be fair, churning out anniversary kits left, right and Chelsea. 

Here at Showboat HQ, though, we're motoring on through the summer, like a pissed-up uncle on a jet-ski. Which isn't to say we're phoning it in. No, sir. But we are taking a moment to take it all in after working flat-out since late 2024 building something we think is pretty special.

The Showboat app isn't quite in the App Store yet, but it's now close. It's in the hands of our first round of beta testers and will shortly be in the hands of a few hundred more enthusiasts who've all signed up to be part of our shirt community, a place where you can store your collection virtually, get it valued by experts, and shortlist the shirts you love from others. If that sounds like your bag, you can get early access here.

Time for Issue #3

📋 Team Selections - The definitive Showboat picks
🍻 Pre-Match Interview: A pint with…Lee Nash
💺 On The Bench: And not a chance of getting a kick
📖 Half-Time - A quick delve into the match-day programme
💥 Showboaters - Those in our community who stand out
👕 Post Match Clobber - Kits and benchwear we’re loving at the minute
🌊 Singing us off - The ultimate beach boy

Team Selections

On our team sheet this month…

↣ A documentary on Sampdoria’s cashmere-wearing, skirt-chasing, title-winning squad from 1990/91. All the players contribute here, as they did then, but it’s the bond between Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli that jumps from the screen. The Good Season is worth your time. LK.

↣ Drafting in Hermanos Gutierrez might sound like a last throw of the dice late in the transfer window but Adrian Quesada has played a blinder on the gorgeous summer track, ‘Primos’. Goes lovely with a Cigarillo, this one. RL.

A Pint with… Lee Nash

Lee Nash co-founded Glory Magazine almost a decade ago, and it has since become the destination magazine for anyone interested in football culture, photography, and travel. Each edition focuses on a different place, unearthing something new about the game every time. They’ve created a serious body of work which also happens to look beautiful on a bookshelf.    

Great to see you, Lee. Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your earliest football memories.

I’m sure I’ve got earlier memories but, from what I recall, I got the nickname ‘glory hunter’ very early on. I think I was seven, and Liverpool just had won the double. My best mate at primary school was a Liverpool fan, and I don't think I had a team at that point. I just remember him almost taking me under his wing and saying ‘Look, if you want to find a football team, they’ve just won everything, they're the most successful team, follow them’. I remember an awful photo of me in a Man Utd shirt that my mum had given me from a jumble sale when I was about five or six...I've since burned that so no one sees it. It was probably around that same year as Mexico ‘86 - a proper World Cup, in colour, with Gary Lineker in his wrist-supports scoring a hat-trick against Poland. Whenever I look back it almost feels like my awakening to football really existing. 1986 was a vintage year for me. Later, I did switch allegiances to Ipswich at 13 and am a proud season ticket holder so I should say I'm not necessarily all about the glory on the pitch anymore!

Can you tell me how the initial concept for Glory came together? Who was involved? How did that happen?

I had wanted my own football magazine since I was a kid. One day I saw a social post from an incredible photographer named Ryan Mason, who I’d previously worked with, asking for a creative director to get involved with a project he'd conceived and I was the first person to respond. We met for coffee and the idea felt like nothing anyone was doing at the time. Since then lots of magazines have cropped up doing something similar but back then there was nobody in that space between football and travel. We chose a destination and made a whole edition on a specific place which was quite an alien concept then. At that time, we were desensitised by the disposability of football media. We wanted to make something for ourselves, something to put on our coffee tables. We didn’t want it to be disposable. We wanted to make something a bit pretentious. We liked long-form content, slow journalism. We wanted something with longevity.

How did the first issue come together?

We had the concept but then we were, like, shit, where do we go? We did lots of research and wanted a place that was the antithesis of the Premier League, somewhere super-remote that nobody was documenting. We stumbled upon the Faroe Islands. Ryan and I would send photos to each other of these pitches by the sea and incredible mountains and we discovered that around 40% of their population went to watch football on a Saturday so we knew there was a real football culture. The head of tourism, Levi Hanssen, who happened to be a footballer for one of their top-flight clubs and had played internationally, bought into everything we wanted to do. Levi saw the potential in an independent magazine showcasing their football culture. It felt like just a few weeks later we were in the Faroe Islands and that’s how it came to be.

So how does your background in design influence the magazine and the studio more generally?

Ryan left about three years ago so I now have a small extended team but I’m the lead on Glory. Naturally whatever we made had to have intelligent writing but, from the start, it was essential that Glory had to be aesthetically beautiful. It had to have weight to it. It had to be something you wanted to keep, to treasure. I was massively influenced by a magazine called Ray Gun, led by an incredible art director David Carson. From him, I learned that you could be inspired not by what you’re reading but by what you’re looking at. A magazine could be super aesthetic. Hopefully, this is something we’ve been able to carry since the first issue. For me, every issue must have a real sense of place. So if we go to Seville it should feel more Spanish and be influenced by Spanish typography and patterns. In Milan, we'll ensure it's slightly more fashion-led. So my background in design had a huge impact both initially and also carrying on and constantly trying to stand out in a saturated market.

So what are the challenges for a high-end football publication? The same issues as everyone else, cost?

Yeah, massively. Constant rising costs which we don’t want to pass on to our readers. Since we started, our unit costs – the cost to make an issue – have doubled. The cost of the actual magazine has only gone up a couple of quid in that time. So the margin has gone. Brexit hurt us. Before then about 60% of our readership came from abroad, something I was really proud of. Post-Brexit with customs, postage costs, etc it’s probably swung the other way and maybe 70% of our readers are in the U.K. It’s become increasingly difficult to get the magazine into the hands of people abroad. And because every issue is dedicated to a different football culture some will strike a chord with the audience more than others but that’s the beauty of being 100% independent. We aren’t beholden to sales. We pride ourselves on being an authority on football and travel and that means going places not everyone will always want to read about.

So how do you actually choose where to go?

I still don’t know where we’re going for our next issue but I love that. We talk to football associations, and tourist boards and some are quick to get them over the line, others are slow burners and take nine months. Generally, we try to go where the story is or stay ahead of the curve enough to go where we think the story is going to be. For our second issue, we went to Kosovo. It was an incredibly political issue to make after launching our first issue on the Faroe Islands where everything was beautiful and remote but we wanted to be where history was when Kosovo played their first game as a FIFA-recognised country. Their ultras, the Dardenët, were crying at what was happening. It was a special moment to capture.

So as a football and travel man, what do World Cups mean to you?

I love the World Cup more than I love any other tournament. I was at Germany '06 and Qatar '22. I’m a football romantic so I will forever try to take the politics out of it as much as I can. We created a whole issue on Qatar ’22 and the reasoning of that was that all we were reading was the negative press, which was completely justified, but what about the people who live in Qatar, how do they feel, the circus is about to arrive and it’s a massive culture shift forced upon them, so why don’t we try give the locals a voice. We spoke to the Secretary-General, we asked the difficult questions and I think that shining a spotlight and starting a conversation is a good thing in my eyes. It will be the same thing with Saudi Arabia when they host the tournament. If football becomes a catalyst and speeds up change then that's a good thing.

When we arrived in Qatar the first thing we wanted to see was if there was a football culture there and not just propaganda. Myself and our photographer, Ryan, arrived at a game and there were about 50 people in the stadium. We had no idea how we’d make an issue from what we were seeing. But we discovered the culture of fans going to the stadium and watching the game on TV’s from inside the stadium rather than on the terraces. Very social. A Majlis, they call it. Again, a different culture to our own but one we wanted to highlight and explore because it’s important to understand the game is consumed in different ways, which is sort of why we founded Glory in the first place. The U.K. way isn’t the only way. Travel allows for that.

Where are the great football cities or towns you’ve visited over the last decade?

Dublin is incredible, to see Bohemians there is special. Barcelona is probably the place I’ve visited most in the world and it's incredibly nostalgic from my childhood.

But I guess being a great football city isn’t actually about what happens on the pitch.

That’s the ethos of Glory. I don’t care what’s happening on the pitch. Whenever I brief a photographer it's about pre-match. I would much prefer they spend their time in pubs, social clubs, outside the grounds, with the burger sellers. That, for me, is the culture. That’s the story. That’s what makes a great footballing destination. I don’t want to see pictures of players. I’d use the club photographer for that. Turn the camera around. I want to see people screaming and picking their noses. I want to see people flicking the Vs, holding up dubious banners, and I want all that stuff because it's something fans create themselves.

What’s next for Glory? Are there any new formats or frontiers you’re exploring as a magazine and a studio?

I think people buy into Glory for our aesthetic but also our knowledge as well so we’re working with brands, we’re white-labelling, we’ve released a documentary with Umbro, and we've actually gone full circle and made a documentary on the Faroe Islands. I guess the aspiration for Glory will be to become a content studio/lifestyle brand. But first and foremost we've got three new publications on the way (Hamburg, Colorado Rapids and Hibernian) which I'm incredibly excited about.

💺On The Bench

Infantino by name, infantino by nature. Not content with worming his way into the top job at FIFA and selling the World Cup to any dictatorship that’ll have him, he now wants to vacuum-seal any joy that might be left in the game. He did it in Qatar when he hoodwinked Lionel Messi into wearing Qatari garb as he was about to lift the World Cup at the behest of his paymasters and he’s up to it again this summer with a bloated four-week tournament in the blistering heat with sky-high ticket prices. Players don’t know if last season has ended or a new one has begun. On his watch FIFA has become the worst kind of big. The kind who’d throw a party on their birthday, make you attend and leave you with the tab.

Half-Time Read

A topical one from the archives. Read The Blizzard’s excellent feature on Denmark’s fairytale 1992 European Championship but, whatever you do, don’t mention the beach to Peter Schmeichel.

Showboaters

↣ In the heart of California sits a football shirt mecca. Saturdays Football manages to be a community hub, a boutique and a place where you can talk football for hours. One of our favourite spots on the West Coast, which is saying something.

↣ A short walk from Porto city centre and a 15-minute cab from the beach sits Retro City Porto, home to some outstanding vintage football shirts. Forget 90s classics, you can grab 70s classics and be back on a sun-lounger before you know it.

↣ Danilo Ciancia showcased one of the most comprehensive collections we’ve ever seen. A shirt from every season of Lionel Messi’s career. Named, numbered, the lot. Over 150 in total. Serious showboating.

Post Match Clobber

↣ Sevilla and adidas rekindled a relationship stretching back to the 70s, promising bespoke designs and no templates. They’ve started strong.

↣ Over The Pitch and Mizuno dropped a streetwear collection inspired by the Japanese firm’s iconic boot: the Morelia. It works.

That's Issue #3 in the books. If you're a shirt collector (or even if you have a few lying around at home) sign up for our app here, upload your shirts and get them valued by our team. They might be worth a few bob. 

Cheers

Lee, Rob & Antonio

There's only one man who can play us off this week, especially given our beach theme. Brian Wilson broke ground with this wordless hymn, conducting a 67-second symphony so perfect it'll take you beyond the beach, beyond the water, to somewhere you've not been before, only dreamt of.