Congratulations to Leicester City!
This evening we announce that Leicester City are the winners of our Gold Award for the best Premier League programme of the 2021/22 season.
The Foxes have produced a fantastic programme, well-designed and packed full of features, which deserves to be recognised as the best in the league. Each issue contains a series of fascinating historical features in the ‘City Heritage’ section. Well researched and engagingly written, these features offer a valuable insight into the history of the club. The Leicester programme also excels in terms of the level of opposition coverage included in every issue, as well as offering in-depth club information, including details of the club’s community work and an impressive section on Leicester City Women, participating in the WSL for the first time in 2021/22. The programme is also well designed, making each issue a pleasure to read through and demonstrating how to make effective use of simple, uncomplicated page designs. Our congratulations go to the whole team responsible for putting together such a classy issue.
Our congratulations also go to our Silver and Bronze Award winners, Norwich City and Brentford respectively. Both clubs have produced excellent programmes that are worthy of special recognition.
Norwich City have picked up awards from Premier Progs in each of the last two years, and this season’s programme is another impressive effort from the Canaries. Offering more pages of content than any other issue in the league, there is always plenty to read in Norwich’s programme. This includes an excellent opposition section in every issue, packed full of information about Norwich’s opponents for the day, and various retro features, including articles marking the 50th anniversary of the club’s first promotion to the top-flight of English football.
Brentford meanwhile produced a fine programme for the first appearance at this level since the 1940s. Worthy of particular note are the eye-catching cover illustrations from David Flanagan and a welcome mix of contemporary and historical coverage. Winners of our 2019/20 Merit Award for the best programme in the Championship, it is great to see Brentford maintaining such high standards with their programmes, collecting their second award in three seasons. Just like their fine team, their programme is a welcome addition to the Premier League!
We must also pay tribute to everyone involved in each club’s programme. There is no such thing as a poor programme in the league and the consistently high quality of issues makes the process of choosing a winner really tough each and every season.
You can read our reviews for all of this season’s Premier League issues here and read more about how we assess each programme below.
Click here to see all of the awards we have issued during the last five seasons.
How we mark the programmes
The criteria we use to judge our annual award winners cover four categories. These are listed below with some of the questions we typically ask when coming up with our scores for each issue.
- Design and Layout – how well designed is the programme? Is the text easy to read? Is there some kind of logical order to the way the programme unfolds? Is there any original artwork included?
- Original Content – how much reading does the programme offer? How well written are the features? Are they informative? What historical articles are included?
- Opposition Coverage – what proportion of the programme is given over to coverage of the visiting team? Are there any articles about the club? Do we learn anything we may not have known before, such as tactical set up?
- Club Information – how much does the programme tell us about all aspects of the club? Does each issue cover the club’s other teams, such as the Academy and women’s teams? Are their articles about the club’s community work? What is there in terms of news and stats?
As always, the scores we give each issue are naturally a reflection of our personal preferences and the things that we consider to be most important in a good programme.