Our look at the current season Premier League issues continues with the Everton programme. This is an issue that shows signs of improvement from last season. Read our full review below and click here to see all of the 2019/20 issues.
Following a few seasons of rather inconsistent issues, the traditionally strong Everton programme shows clear signs of improvement for the 2019/20 season, mixing detailed features and club information with clean, unfussy design work.
Most of the content is current in nature, with the main feature being ‘The Big Interview’ with one Everton player. This covers eight pages, with plenty of text to justify the feature’s title. Another article covers a former Toffees star over five pages, which are rather frustratingly broken up by advertising content, giving the article a somewhat disjointed feel. The actual design work on the feature pages themselves is though well laid-out. Another three-page article again includes a good proportion of text, with credit due to the writers and editor for not overloading features with images in order to fill space.
Other original content includes an interview with one members of Everton’s staff, providing an interesting background to the operational side of the club. In the Wolves issue the person featured was Charlotte Renshaw – Everton’s First-Team Player Care Manager, who describes her role in helping new signings to settle and adjust to their new life off the pitch. The EFC Heritage Society also has a page, which focuses on various items of Everton memorabilia. In the Wolves issue, the article featured two programmes from games against the visitors in 1982 and 1984, providing the opportunity to comment on the improvement in the side as Everton moved in to their successful mid-1980s period. The article reproduces the back pages of both issues, showing the respective line-ups from each game. There are also four pages of content aimed at Everton’s younger fans, including a player Q&A and a quiz.
The opposition section is also impressive. Covering eight pages in all, the section opens with a page that includes form notes, some ‘Did You Know’ facts, and basic club information. ‘Pages from History’ is a retro feature, which for the Wolves issue reproduced a double-page picture of the club’s famous Molineux stadium, taken in 1958 when Wanderers were league champions. The image is wonderfully evocative of a past era and perfectly complements the current content in the section. There is a full-page profile of the visiting club’s manager, which offers more than the standard pen-pic used in many clubs’ programmes. This is followed by four pages of player profiles, with images and stats in football-sticker style, as well as a club honours board.
The programme includes all the standard club information one would expect. There are manager and captain columns, both accompanied by full-page photographs. These are followed by a two-page action shot from a recent game and a couple of pages of club news. There is a two-page fixtures and results section included in the middle of the programme – in the way that many old stapled programmes used to, before the section was typically pushed to the back of the programme in the era of perfect-bound issues. This is accompanied by a page of stats relating to the day’s fixture and a separate page of appearance and goalscoring records. There is a page on the club’s community work and a three-page section of fan pictures called ‘All Together Now’. The programme includes plenty of coverage of Everton’s other teams, with a two-page section on the under-23s, including detailed notes on recent games and player development. There is also a page each for the under-18s and Everton Ladies, followed by a page of stats for each of the three teams.
There is much then to admire about this Everton issue. Although there is something of a bias towards current player and club content, this is broken up by a couple of retro features and a genuinely interesting behind the scenes feature.