Children’s football magazine Shoot has will close this month after 40 years, having been unable to fight off competition from BBC Magazines’ Match of the Day and Bauer Consumer Media’s Match.
IPC Inspire said it would cease publishing the youth football magazine from the end of June.
IPC Inspire managing director Paul Williams said: ‘It is with great regret that we have had to make this decision. We are of course in consultation with the six permanent staff directly affected by the proposal, and every effort will be made to find alternative jobs if this becomes necessary”.
IPC Inspire added it was in exclusive negotiations with Pedigree Books regarding the sale of the Shoot trademark and all intellectual property.
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Pedigree Books currently publishes the market-leading Shoot Christmas Annual and a range of other seasonal activity books and annuals that carry the Shoot brand.
In March Shoot switched from a monthly to a weekly in reaction to the launch of Match of the Day. In response Bauer Consumer Media slashed the price of Match to 99p in contrast to Shoot’s retail price of £1.80.
Shoot saw a circulation turnaround in the second half of 2007m thanks to a major redesign in October, which covered the last two issues of the ABC audit period.
The title was up 7 per cent after suffering a sales decline from nearly 120,000 in 1996 to just 33,455 for the first half of 2007.
Shoot was weekly for almost 20 years, originally battling with Match in the mid-Nineties.
Match dominates the children’s football magazine market, with a circulation of 113,049 in the second half of 2007, the most recent ABC figures. That figure represented a year-on-year fall of 13 per cent.
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