By the time this year’s World Cup had ended, Harry Kane must have hated Roy of the Rovers. Even before the tournament kicked off, English pundits were likening him to Britain's great footballing comic-book hero and, after his hat-trick taking England to 6-1 in the Panama game, the comparisons really started flying.
"This is real Roy of the Rovers stuff!" whooped Clive Tyldesley when Kane scored against Colombia. "Harry Kane [is] the Roy of the Rovers comic-book hero, leading the line and getting the glory," proclaimed Reuters. "It’s an old cliché about Roy of the Rovers," advised The Times, "but [he] really is."
On and on they went, the pundit panegyrics making Harry sound like a real-life rendering of a fictional being, a sort of football version of the virtual band Gorillaz. But what did they really mean? Who was this Roy of the Rovers — Roy Race to give him his 'proper' name — character? What the pundits meant was, Harry is not only a great striker like Roy Race, but also a throwback to the modest values of the Fifties, when Roy was invented for the boys’ comic Tiger. "In the midst of all this 21st-century madness," said the London paper City AM, "there has been an antidote embodied by Tottenham’s Harry Kane. Darling of the London media, he is a present-day star yet an old-fashioned Roy of the Rovers."
"He is the wholesome Roy of the Rovers, golf-loving, family-man type," mooned the Daily Mail in agreement, "unlikely to risk it all on red at the roulette table in Monte Carlo."
It was all a bit wrong, though. Because Roy Race was originally a successor to old-school British adventurers like Dan Dare; he’s usually thought of as a doughty hero with a big side of righteous manliness. That might have been true in the Fifties, but in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, Roy — a talented but trouble-prone number nine who played for Melchester Rovers and married the gorgeous, feisty club secretary Penny — was part of an unofficial, now mostly forgotten, experiment in comics that saw him and other characters dealing with the darker sides of football. It was a new direction that involved real-life stars of entertainment, tabloid scandals, football violence, political pressure groups, the royal family, a threat to virtually close down Britain’s biggest magazine publisher and a debate in the House of Commons. The aim was to make comics relevant to a new generation of kids, and out of it came comics that deserve to be celebrated more than they are, and certainly more than some of the A-meh-rican superhero stuff dissected by contemporary nerdtellectuals. Thankfully, the balance may be about to shift, because the experiment is, to an extent, being revived by Roy’s current custodians.
This autumn, Rebellion Publishing, an Oxford-based computer games company that bought the long-running sci-fi comic 2000 AD in 2000 and the defunct Roy of the Rovers in 2017, will publish the first new Roy Race stories since 2001. In a graphic novel, Kick-Off, and an illustrated novel, Scouted, Roy and Melchester will star in gritty, realistic tales of modern football. And though the books are officially aimed at pre-teen boys, it’s pretty clear Rebellion is also shooting for their older brothers and fathers. As Rob Power at Roy Race’s new publisher says: "When you start talking to men, you find there are loads of them who were never that into superheroes but loved British comics. That’s part of the market we want to hit with the new Roy.
"It’s ostensibly aimed at eight-to-12-year-olds, but we think men will read it as well, just like their dads used to read their comics. From the preliminary announcements we’ve done, we’ve seen the interest is there. What richer territory could you have than modern football, with all its endless stories? It could be huge."
The story of modern British football comics really begins in London at the start of the Seventies, in the offices of IPC/Fleetway Publications near Fleet Street. Fleetway, a division of the UK publishing conglomerate IPC, published kids’ comics, which were a huge business at the time. These were not full-colour, single-story American superhero titles like Spider-Man or The Mighty Thor, but predominantly black and white, magazine-sized publications on cheap, rough newsprint, usually containing individual comic-strip stories, text-based features and news. They divided, roughly speaking, into girls’ comics such as Misty and Bunty, funnies like The Dandy and The Beano, and boys’ adventure titles such as Eagle, Lion and The Hotspur. They sold for pence (3p in 1970, rising to about 10p by the end of the inflation-hit Seventies) and, being pretty much the only kids’ entertainment on offer apart from a few TV programmes, they sold in huge numbers. Comics could shift between 150,000 and 400,000 copies a week, a staggering figure by today’s print media standards, and sales of 300,000 would bring in around the equivalent of £150,000 a week, some £600,000 monthly.
Since they began in the late 19th century, boys’ adventure comics had featured brave military men, intrepid explorers and plucky police officers, but since the Fifties, stories about sport — and football in particular — had been doing increasingly well. Tiger, launched by Fleetway in 1954, was billed as a sports and adventure title, and Roy of the Rovers had quickly become the biggest star in the comic, and then one of the biggest in the boys’ adventure market. He was created by a writer called Frank S Pepper to be an up-to-date modern pro, and not one of the familiar public-school toffs or squeaky, overgrown schoolboys epitomised by The Victor’s Gorgeous Gus and Danny of the Dazzlers in The Champion. Roy Race was meant to be a modern, classless individual for a prosperous era when the word 'meritocracy' was coming into vogue: "An ordinary lad, with talent, with whom the reader could identify, joining a top-class club… and making his way up the ladder," as Pepper described him.
Melchester Rovers, the club he joined as a 16-year-old and subsequently captained, are sometimes said to have been based on the Arsenal sides of the Fifties, but seemed like they could be from anywhere. What really set the strip apart right from the outset was its closeness to real life. That was largely due to the work of the original artist Joe Colquhoun, a legend of British comics, who took great care not just with on-pitch action but with stadia, crowds and players’ off-duty clothes, and soon began writing the stories, too (which was unusual; stories were generally written frame by frame by the writer and then passed to the artist to illustrate). It also helped that Tiger’s editor Derek Birnage courted Bobby Charlton, and for several years from 1960, Charlton was credited as the official Roy of the Rovers writer, though it’s probably likely that Birnage was doing the real work.
The British comics industry was dominated by two companies, the go-ahead Fleetway, and DC Thomson, a big family-owned company in Dundee famous for publishing The Dandy and The Beano. The companies were sworn enemies: with so much revenue at stake, security was kept tight so that ideas didn’t leak out. "I worked at Fleetway from the Sixties to the Eighties," one former editor told me, "and I can't remember more than one or two members of staff moving between the companies. You were constantly listening for gossip or news about new ideas they may be thinking of, and trying to top it. It was all very secretive, and very competitive."
By 1970, those new ideas were becoming more and more important. While no one was yet losing sleep over sales, the boys’ adventure market was in slow decline, losing out to television and pop music. In 1953, Eagle, the best-loved comic of the old school, with its mix of chisel-jawed, officer-class heroes and strivers from the lower orders, had sold 750,000 copies weekly; by 1962 it was down to 412,000.
In the wake of England’s 1966 World Cup win, however, football stories were more and more popular. It helped that George Best, with his Beatle haircut, rebel behaviour and glamorous girlfriends, had invented rock ’n’ roll soccer. Since Best’s breakthrough at Manchester United, individual character had become more of a thing, with the emergence of post-Best flair players such as Peter Osgood and Rodney Marsh, and the new breed of short-tempered, hard-man defenders like Ron 'Chopper' Harris and Norman 'Bites Yer Legs' Hunter. It probably didn’t hurt either that hooliganism and stories about money and corruption seeping into the game were adding a bit of controversy, though no one said so.
Some of the younger staff at Fleetway and DC Thomson believed the comics needed to represent the new world, particularly when it came to football. Barrie Tomlinson, who became Tiger editor in 1969, recalls that Roy of the Rovers was "still the top story in Tiger, but when I became editor, the readership was more aware of what was going on in the world and expected their hero to be more true to life. Football was becoming general news, not just something on the sports pages, and I wanted to take advantage of that interest."
The question, of course, would be how one went about that when much of real-life football was becoming controversial, and most of your official readership were still at junior school.
In 1970, Fleetway banked on football and published the first ever football-only comics, Scorcher and Score ’n’ Roar. Scorcher was fairly safe and trad (though Bobby of the Blues did have Beatle-esque hair, and Lags Eleven featured prisoners using football to cover an escape attempt), but Score ’n’ Roar, which launched on the back of Scorcher’s success, felt like a whole new ball game.
To be fair, a couple of strips had touched on the new world of football before — The Hornet’s Ball of Fire was about a fiery, Best-like genius, and Jag’s fantastic Football Family Robinson had alluded to football violence in an episode about an evil tycoon colluding with coin-throwing hooligans. But Score ’n’ Roar went further. The twin strips Jack of United and Jimmy of City featured two brothers who played for rival sides and, in the contrast between boring, blazer-wearing Jack Chelsey and flamboyant long-haired brother Jimmy, satirised the split between football’s old guard and the new fancy dans. Lord Rumsey’s Rovers had another flamboyant dandy in Rumsey’s son Bertram, who annoyed pater with his Chelsea boots and hip lingo. ("Don’t call me ‘Daddy-O’ you insolent pup! And get your hair cut. You look like some freak!")
The greatest Score ’n’ Roar story was Nipper, written by Tom Tully, a Glaswegian who became a Roy of the Rovers writer in 1969. The hero Nipper Lawrence is an orphan in a godforsaken industrial city, drawn black and brooding by Argentinian artist Francisco Solano Lopez, so it resembled a sporting version of Ken Loach’s Kes, as if imagined by David Peace. Nipper, who plays for Blackport Rovers, is picked on by grotesque, psycho villains and caught up in corruption scams.
In February 1970, DC Thomson responded to Scorcher by bringing back an old title, The Wizard, with extra, strongly flagged-up football content, including a strip about the early days of George Best that focused on his school truancy, and the Fiery Man at Number Six. The Fiery Man was Joe Greer, "a hard-tackling left-half" who struggled to control his temper when harassed: naturally an early episode allowed him to demonstrate the righteousness of his 'fire' by wading in to sort out fighting yobs. Meanwhile at Tiger, Tomlinson began updating Roy in earnest. In 1967, the title introduced a female artist, Yvonne Hutton, who gave Melchester a new, asymmetric modern strip to wear, and Roy a modish, collar-length haircut that gave him something of a glam-rock look and would seem to grow longer throughout the Seventies. This may have come to the attention of Pink Floyd: their 1974 tour programme featured a cartoon strip, Rog of the Rovers, telling the story of Roger Waters’ career as "ace goalscorer" for Grantchester Rovers.
British football was getting darker and harder edged. In 1974, Manchester United fans ran amok up and down the land when the club was relegated, a Bolton fan stabbed a 17-year-old Blackpool supporter to death at Bloomfield Road, and Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan were sent off for fighting in the Charity Shield match between Leeds United and Liverpool. The following year, Spurs and Chelsea fans fought a televised battle at White Hart Lane, and Leeds fans rioted after their European Cup Final loss in Paris. There was much talk about commercialisation, transfer fees and sponsorship. In 1974, there was outcry when England’s shirts carried a manufacturer’s logo for the first time, and much hand-wringing when Bob Latchford went from Birmingham City to Everton for a princely £350,000.
So perhaps it was unsurprising that when IPC/Fleetway launched Roy of the Rovers as a stand-alone, football-themed title in September 1976, with Tomlinson as editor, it had, along with its title story, several strips that were perhaps more at home in the A Clockwork Orange Seventies than the black-and-white Fifties. Lots of it was madcap — even fabulously unhinged in the case of The Hard Man, the popular tale of tough, outspoken centre-half Johnny Dexter’s dealings with a ludicrous, fat, shaven-headed Hungarian manager called Victor Boskovic, who was notoriously prone to fainting. But there were also light, contemporary dystopian touches, like Millionaire Villa (about a club accepting £2m from millionaire David Bradley in exchange for a place in the team).
The comic also squared up to hooligans. On front pages, Roy begged readers to spurn the violence and launched a competition in which young readers were invited to send in ideas for dealing with thugs at matches. In 1977, the comic carried a story in which Roy tries his own ideas when "Gatesfield Goons" ("the fans with the worst reputation in British football!") arrive for the Melchester-Gatesfield game. The Goons pile out of the station expecting to meet Melchester’s firm, but it turns out that Roy has arranged for the Official Supporters’ Club to provide a friendly reception. "Greeted with friendliness, instead of hostility, the Gatesfield fans just don’t know what to do with themselves!" notes a certain sheepskin-jacketed TV reporter. If only the likes of Manchester United and Chelsea had been paying attention.
Tomlinson’s success with Roy of the Rovers made him an industry legend before he retired in the Nineties. He’s a light entertainer at heart who talks about Roy as if he’s real: when I meet him at his home in rural Lincolnshire, he punctuates the conversation by handing me signed drawings he has had an artist prepare earlier ("Roy popped in earlier and left this for you, Richard!"). Leafing through his old copies, I ask if it was a conscious decision to mix hooliganism, indiscipline and corruption with the stories. "Not really," he says. "The writer and I would talk about the general situation over a long lunch, try to put the world to rights and agree to put things in the storyline. Tom Tully was happy to involve Roy in harsher things, but there was no conscious decision.
"In the Fifties, they would have just ignored hooliganism, for sure. I felt we should reflect real life, and if you wanted to reflect real life, you had to take in hooliganism. So, we felt we should try to lead the way and talk to people about how they should behave, hopefully making a contribution."
Steve Finan, an editor at DC Thomson for 40 years, points out that it wasn’t just about reflecting reality — writers were also always looking to pre-empt it. "The important thing was their ability to predict the future," he says, sitting in DC Thomson’s new offices in Dundee. "The guys kept an eye on the latest football developments around the world — which wasn’t easy in the non-digital age — with close attention on tactics, skills, fashions, commercialisation and politics, and then tried to recreate it and take it to another level. They were skilled, perceptive guys. And, bizarrely, some of the predictions made in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties came true and even exceeded the fantastical imaginings of those scriptwriters."
While Tomlinson was launching the Roy of the Rovers comic, elsewhere in Fleetway House trouble was brewing. Pat Mills, a freelance writer who had recently created the hard-
hitting war comic Battle, had been charged with another new, gritty, modern adventure title. Action, which debuted in February 1976, was violent, anarchic and exciting, with popular strips including Hook Jaw (about a huge, marauding Jaws-like great white shark), Kids Rule OK (gangs of feral children in a post-apocalyptic London) and Tom Tully’s Look Out for Lefty, the story of hot-headed, yobbish striker Kenny 'Lefty' Lampton, his repulsive, Steptoe-ish granddad and tough, impetuous and loyal skinhead girlfriend Ange.
It was Ange who took The Step Too Far. Look Out For Lefty featured a lot of on- and off-field fighting, dark plotting and pitch invasions made to look like fun ("Hey up! They’re coming over the barriers and the game’s only 10 minutes old!"). In September 1976, though, in an issue with a cover featuring the kids from Kids Rule OK attacking a terrified policeman, Ange lost it. Having watched Lefty’s opponent Jarvis cheat and goad him throughout the game, she picked up an empty Coke bottle and threw it into Jarvis’s face. As the rozzers waded in and a fight broke out on the terraces, a bleeding Jarvis is led away by St John Ambulance men, and Ange pleads innocent. The police arrest the wrong people, Lefty looks on thinking "Good old Ange!" and a few minutes later scores with a left-foot rocket. What japes!
Unfortunately for IPC/Fleetway, the Daily Mail spotted it. Under the headline "Comic Strip Hooligans", journalist Joe Steeples fumed at the comic "read by 180,000 children each week" and accused it "of pandering to violence". Alan Hardaker, the Football League secretary, was invited to condemn it and seized the chance with both hands. "It is really appalling that there are people so brain-less as to sell comics to children with stuff like this inside them," he said. "The man responsible ought to be hit over the head with a bottle himself."
Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, a notorious, opportunistic conservative campaign group, then weighed in, along with a group calling itself the Delegates Opposing Violent Education. On the early evening current affairs show Nationwide, the avuncular presenter Frank Bough tore up the comic live on air. At one point that autumn, the House of Commons found time to raise the matter in a debate about children’s media.
IPC boss John Sanders tried to defend it but, according to comic historians, WH Smith and John Menzies threatened to remove all IPC magazines from sale unless Action was withdrawn. Its publication halted, and when Action returned in December, Lefty was a toothless Roy of the Rovers retread in a comic barely more edgy than Score ’n’ Roar. DC Thomson’s response to Action, Bullet, continued unscathed.
Tomlinson watched the Action story with intrigue. "We looked at it when it came out, and we were interested in how they’d develop the Lefty story. It was worth trying to make the stories gritty and to update them a bit, but it went too far too quickly. Afterwards I always made sure no bottles were featured in the crowd scenes in Roy of the Rovers! But then," he says, "I had a very different idea of how to keep Roy relevant."
Tomlinson’s idea was no less innovative than Action, and may well be the reason why Roy is still remembered now while others like Bobby of the Blues are forgotten. When the comic launched in 1976, he asked IPC if they could advertise it. Told there was no budget, he began to think about how he could get Roy into the press. He began approaching public figures. With the cheeky pluck of a comic-book hero, he began by writing to the Duke of Edinburgh to ask if he’d write Roy a good-luck letter for the first issue. Incredibly, he said yes. (Later, in 1987, when the Duke visited the IPC offices, Tomlinson recalled: "He’d heard of Roy of the Rovers, but wasn’t quite sure what it was. He thought it was a soap opera, which actually gave me an idea… I explained, and he agreed.")
Tomlinson then began writing letters to newspapers signing himself 'Roy Race', and the letters got published. After that it struck him that he might get even more space if he made the comic storylines newsworthy, and so he gave Roy a private life. He became the first boys’ comic character in history to get married (the players formed a guard of honour), and then have kids (readers got to vote on the names). All this was reported in the nationals, and when Penny left Roy in 1981 (because he thought more of Melchester Rovers than her), it was such a big story that Tomlinson spent 12 hours being interviewed for TV and radio.
All this made it easier to involve celebrities. Many real players and managers posed with their arms around a life-size cardboard cut-out, Alf Ramsey appeared as Rovers manager, football stars Trevor Francis and Malcolm MacDonald turned up in the comic, Geoff Boycott became Melchester’s chairman, while for a brief, surreal period in 1985, Steve Norman and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet became Melchester players. In other storylines, Roy took trips to royal weddings, played during an earthquake and starred in a whodunnit mystery, when he was mysteriously shot.
"We were now competing with television, and as soap operas were very popular on TV, it was important to turn the Roy of the Rovers story into a soap opera. The readers stuck with him through the adventures because he was their best friend, their favourite footballer, and the one they could be close to. They couldn’t be close to their real-life team’s centre forward, could they? But they would have liked to be. With Roy they got to share his adventure."
There was no disputing the success of his methods: at its Eighties peak, Roy of the Rovers was shifting 450,000 copies a week.
What was it about those footballers that made them so popular, while British superheroes never really, um, took off? It’s an unfashionable thing to say now that we're all living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but for a long time the costumes and tights never suited the British man. We’ve never produced a homegrown version, the corny Captain Britain aside, and even the great Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison said "the relationship of Britons to the figure of the US superhero [comes] with a great deal of antagonism".
Maybe those of us who love British comics are less into all-powerful figures than fallible heroes making the best of cock-ups and idiots in a world we recognise. That certainly matches most people’s experience of football, and maybe that’s why we so readily find our heroes there. And just as there are lots of variants on the superhero so their fans can find the one that speaks to them, so each position and each type of player could speak to individual readers. The never-say-die keeper. The misunderstood hard-man centre-half. The devoted coach. Aspiring urchins, hot-headed geniuses, ruthless schemers. There’s enough in most park-football changing rooms to fill a comic if you have the eye. You don’t need capes.
Nipper, who ran in different comics for years, was always my mate. I think it was more because he seemed humble and unpretentious, and would therefore have understood the way my enthusiasm outstripped my actual footballing ability. I also liked how he tried to rally his team with yeomanly integrity ("Stop arguing! For Pete’s sake pull yourselves together Blackport or we’ve had it!"), and I can remember, to my cringing embarrassment, repeating some of his lines when playing for my junior school team. That’s the thing about football heroes: you latch on to them because they embody something you feel you have inside you, that you’d like to be. As the writer Arthur Hopcraft said: in a strange way, a football hero can help you to respect yourself more.
"As the Eighties approached," writes Adam Riches in his book Football Comic Book Heroes: the Ultimate Fantasy Footballers, "the writing was on the wall for boys’ comics." Between 1974 and 1986, as television sets and computers became more widespread, 10 adventure titles closed. There were some new success stories: from 1977 onwards Pat Mills had huge success with 2000AD, which carried violent, futuristic sports stories like Harlem Heroes and Mean Arena in the spirit of Action, but escaped censure because, as Mills pointed out, you can get away with dystopian violence if it’s in a fantasy [sci-fi] setting. And there was Viz, of course, home to Billy the Fish, a strip that existed to take the piss out of the tired tropes of traditional football stories.
As for the new football stories, DC Thomson produced a late classic in 1978 with Stark: Matchwinner for Hire, a mercenary player who appeared in a comic called Scoop. Stark rented himself out by the game, charged per goal, and rocked an amazing off-field look, featuring a black leather trench coat, wide flares, a chunky polo neck and Mick Jagger hair. And the strip We Are United, which appeared in Thomson’s superb 1984–’85 comic Champ, is thought by some comic fans to be the best British football strip of the lot. It had more up-to-date language than anything else and was, innovatively, about all the players in the team, not just one. One player, Alex 'Hedgehog Jones', was a punk; another, Terry Evans, was an inveterate womaniser, boozer and gambler. Private lives, hooliganism and issues like dodgy sponsorship deals featured in the soapy storylines and, cleverly, Champ’s front page would often be a tabloid-y report on United; you could imagine it being revived.
There was another scandal at Melchester as well, a line-crossing moment that caused a mini furore. On 19 July, 1986, Roy of the Rovers’ cover carried a story headlined "The great Melchester massacre", with a picture of three Melchester players lying dead. The team had been kidnapped while visiting a fictional Middle Eastern country, then rescued by the SAS. Unfortunately, their getaway bus had been "hit by an explosives-packed car driven by
a rebel fanatic", and eight of the team had died.
I had outgrown the comic by then, but people from that time talk about being upset by the story, and Tomlinson is uncharacteristically reticent about it. "Not one of my better decisions," he says. "There were indignant letters to the management, and… all I can say now is, we were trying new ideas and that wasn’t a good one." Most of us would forgive him now, I say. He goes to fetch his cardboard cut-out of Roy from the garage so I can take a selfie with him.
Roy starred in a poorly selling Commodore 64 computer game, and even recorded a single with Gary Lineker ('Europe United', a 1992 heavy-metal rap against hooliganism), but the game seemed to be up. Fleetway changed hands, Tomlinson left to do a strip for The Mirror, and Roy of the Rovers closed in 1993. There were Roy strips in other football magazines, and a short-lived monthly (in which Roy lost a leg in a helicopter crash; "the worst idea in the history of comics," according to Tomlinson) but there’s been nothing new from Roy of the Rovers since 2001. Since Rebellion acquired the titles, it has been releasing compilations of classic strips, such as Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s WWI story Charley’s War from Battle Picture Weekly, to considerable success.
When Roy returns in the autumn, it will be as a reboot. He will once again be that humble 16-year-old player starting out, this time with Melchester Rovers at the bottom of League Two, while a big neighbouring club, Tynecaster, owned by a billionaire, is doing well in the Premier League. It’s hoped that there will also be Roy of the Rovers collections, the Rebellion comics project restoring respect to the somewhat lost world of British comicdom.
The acid-coloured, rough-papered comics of the Fleetway archive now sit neatly on shelves in a special area of a vast hangar-like office full of game designers in Oxford, and a few members of the generation of Eighties and Nineties readers sit lovingly restoring and rescanning them. Sitting in a meeting room beside a life-size cardboard cut-out of 2000AD star Judge Dredd, Rob Power takes me through some old issues. Working on the project has made him realise the hold the character still has.
"The interest, the press… we’ve been doing tie-ins with sponsors, and everybody loves it. It’s proper, mainstream British culture. You only have to think of the World Cup and the way Harry Kane’s goal-scoring was constantly being referred to. Sometimes Roy of the Rovers seems like a prism that we see football through.
"I think one of the reasons football has a hold on us," says Power, "is that fans still impose moral standards on it. They give it a meaning and a story. Since I’ve been working on this, I’ve had people say to me that one origin of those moral standards is Roy: that generations of men have absorbed it from the comic. You know, he gave everything, he never fouled, he was upstanding. All the qualities that make the archetype of the ideal footballer, even though that player is as rare as rocking-horse shit. He’s an icon, in the true sense of the word."
It’s Roy’s world, he seems to say; we just watch football in it. We look down at the yellowing pages, ink still bright, lines a bit blurry in places. Nipper tears down the wing, Roy scores another last minute winner, and our dads and older brothers invade the pitch.
Roy of the Rovers: Scouted is published by Rebellion on 4 October; Roy of the Rovers: Kick Off is published on 1 November
