Showboat sit down for a chat with the co-founder and editor of Glory magazine
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.
And finally, we're all about football shirts here at Showboat. Do you have any favourites?
Definitely. AC Milan 1989. Black and red, Maldini on the back. It's a classic. Again, it's probably tied in with growing up with Football Italia on Channel 4. That feeds into another favourite: the 1990 Italy home shirt. A beautiful shirt. I'm not a big fan of overly complicated designs, to be honest. I like simple, classic designs. The Argentina shirt from '86 falls into the same category and is another on my list. I'm sure there's an element of it being tied to my childhood and the impact Maradona had on the tournament and the iconic shot of him lifting the World Cup. And the final one is the 1982 Ipswich home shirt. I think it was the year after they won the UEFA Cup. Really simple adidas shirt. Blue, pinstripes. I'm yet to get my hands on an original but that would definitely make my list.