XI: A NEW NORTH AMERICAN SOCCER MAGAZINE

1,774 posts have been published to my blog, Pitch Invasion, since its founding in 2007. In late 2011, I decided to collect the very best of those posts in book form, in the unimaginatively titled The Very Best of Pitch Invasion. 39 essays were selected for it, and 39 very good ones they were, by two dozen writers exploring soccer culture around the world in long-form. It was the quality of those pieces – most of which weren’t by me, I’d like to make clear – that won Pitch Invasion much acclaim, including a gold medal in the When Saturday Comes web awards in 2010.

Look at those numbers again, though. 1,774 posts; 39 selected for the book, with perhaps the same number again of equal quality as those put into print. That’s something like 5% of the blog’s output. Now, the rest was still – I hope – interesting stuff: a lot of photography, quick analysis, your day-to-day link roundups. It became a grind, and everyone else starting doing the same kind of blogging. Producing the really, really good content – the kind worthy of ink on real paper – became an increasing challenge, buried under the avalanche of Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr (and I genuinely love Tumblr) coming at you all day, every day.

No time to breathe, to think, to write, to edit, to explore the bigger picture in truly thoughtful depth.

That’s why myself and two other bloggers who pioneered longform soccer writing in North America before I took my own crack at it - David Keyes (The Culture of Soccer) and John Turnbull (The Global Game) - decided in the fall of 2011 to create a new soccer publication. Not a blog, updated daily; not a topical news magazine, published weekly or monthly; but a quarterly periodical, giving us time to reflect on what we even want to write about before beginning. When it’s in print, every page will have been through many layers of consideration, its graphical look crafted by a gifted creative dedicated to that task, JL Murtaugh.

XI will offer an outlet for story-tellers to explore the game from a North American perspective as the soccer boom continues on this continent, and the game has gone from marginalized to its forthcoming ESPN-ization. There needs to be a space in which to examine the margins of the game as well as the mainstream; the millions of amateurs and how they play, the supporters’ culture still so readily misunderstood, the women’s game, the business behind the scenes, or the play on the field from an unusual angle. The story of soccer in North America is one with a deeper past than many appreciate – that will be a topic of importance for XI – and its present is a more diverse one than the daily media has time to consider.

The first issue of XI aims to illustrate this: eleven pieces (get it?) will delve into how immigration has shaped North American soccer, from the earliest times to the twenty-first century. The eleven pieces will not all be long-form essays: this story will also be illustrated in other arrangements, from photography to poetry. XI’s form will be flexible, its graphic design shaped by the tales it tells.

We hope that eleven out of eleven pieces will be worth treasuring in print in every issue of XI.

For this to happen, XI needs the support of the soccer community: the publication aims to raise $11,000 over the next four weeks to launch, and you can give whatever you can (over $2) on the XI Kickstarter page. Thank you for anything you can give, or any help in spreading the word (find XI on Twitter, Facebook, G+ and Tumblr too).

- Tom Dunmore