These Football Times

• 1. Introduction

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  These Football Times introduces itself through one detail. In 2016, Andrew Flint, one of its senior writers, picked up the Football Supporters' Federation Writer of the Year. That single credit hints at a publication chasing something more than quick match reports. Why would a small football title produce a writer good enough for a national award? And how does an operation this size end up publishing through The Guardian's own football coverage? Those questions start with the pages themselves, since These Football Times reaches readers in print as well as online.

• 2. One Club At A Time

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  Every two months, a new print issue of These Football Times takes shape, each one centered on one narrow corner of the sport or one particular club. The magazine also calls itself independent, an outlet built around long-form journalism. For each of those issues, its staff often team up with the club being featured, folding that club into how the issue comes together. That hands-on relationship with individual clubs raises a question: how does a magazine built one club at a time also reach readers well beyond its own pages?

• 3. Ties To The Guardian

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  Part of the answer sits in a structural tie: These Football Times sits inside a larger outlet, the Guardian Sport Network. Through that network, its feature stories run regularly on TheGuardian.com, sitting alongside the wider football coverage published there. That access to a national platform is not the only recognition These Football Times writers have picked up.

• 4. Recognition Across The Newsroom

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  Other writers at These Football Times have also picked up nominations, spanning several separate honors within football journalism. That spread of recognized names, across different corners of the sport's press, points to a newsroom whose reputation keeps growing one byline at a time.