Football culture magazine Mundial has made sure its readers feel connected to its journalists, and it’s paying off.
Mundial is a quarterly magazine that launched in 2014 and became profitable within a couple of years but was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, having to cease print publication.
It was brought back in print after being bought in 2022 by Footballco, which owns online brands like Goal, Indivisa covering women’s football and others in non-English languages.
Although Mundial receives support from the wider company Footballco, the core team remains small at about five.
Editor-in-chief James Bird said: “A big part of Mundial being Mundial is us having faces… we wanted our readers to know that we were also real football fans in the same way they were,” he said.
“We also go to football matches. We read books about football. We don’t just write about it, we live it as well, which I think is key.
“You need it as a point of difference, really, because we’ve always been a small team. We’ve always been a niche magazine. To stand out, you’ve got to be a little bit different, in the same way that maybe people don’t know who the editor of some of our rival magazines are, or who the designer or the features editor is for one of our rivals, you probably, if you’re a reader of Mundial, you’re way more likely to because we do events, we go to the events we go to, we actually go to the football, our faces are there.”
Mundial has built a cult following with its own twist on “reminding you why you love football” – taking in the subcultures, nostalgia and lifestyle around the game rather than the on-pitch drama.
It also treats the game “completely democratically,” editor-in-chief James Bird explained.
“So if there is a great story about a five-a-side football match in Wigan on a Tuesday night, played by 40-year-old blokes after work, we’d give that the same prominence that we would give the World Cup final or the Champions League final or the women’s FA Cup final. We treat every single form of the game the same.”
In print, Mundial has a circulation of 10,000 (mostly subscriptions, but also some from newsstands).
For 2025 Mundial has chosen a theme for each issue, the first three of which are: rebel, sex and love, and fashion.
It aims to pique the interest of people who may not be hugely interested in football but perhaps have a passion relating to one of those themes. Bird compared it, for him with little interest in tech, to Wired doing a cover shoot with a link to sport that makes him pick it up.
Meanwhile, in October it relaunched its website and began publishing one subscriber-only feature a day. These go out in a newsletter to about 32,000 people (who include, but are not all, paying subscribers).
Mundial also made the move in December 2023 to launch on Discord, a group messaging platform often used by people gaming together remotely.
About 500 people are on Mundial’s Discord server or virtual community, which is separated into channels for the magazine, the website and gear (to discuss things like new team kits). Paying subscribers to the magazine or the website are given the ability to join the server where they can also take part by voting on which football shirt Mundial should release, for example.
The Mundial team have accounts and show up in the Discord community, with Bird saying: “I think that it’s a really good way again of humanising the product,” citing their ability to show their genuine interest in football, answer questions and hear feedback.
“Previously I’d commission eight features, let’s say, and they all come in, all late, of course, and then they get designed, and then we print it,” Bird said.
“And you have anxiety about printing something, about how much you’ve got wrong, and then you don’t hear anything. It’s just sent into the ether. And now the Discord is a great place for people to talk about what’s in the magazine.”
Mundial has also had strong long-term success in merch, whether by making their own T-shirts, woolly hats and tracksuits, or by collaborating with other sports or fashion brands, independent candlemakers or even coffee brands.
Bird said: “Once there’s a brand or a product that you really, really like, and if you trust them, and they release a T-shirt, you want that T shirt. I’m the same… it’s also really fun. It’s nice to make things.”
The ‘coolest thing’ Mundial has ever done
In March, Mundial released a collaboration with Puma which Bird described as “the coolest thing we’ve ever done”.
Puma asked if Mundial would like to do a Mundial version of the Puma King, which Bird called one of the most iconic football boots of all time.
Every element of the finished product has a reference to something related to Mundial – for example the co-ordinates to the bar in Manchester where the magazine was founded – or the Puma archives.
Mundial also took the lead on the creative around the boots, which are now sold out on the Puma website.
Bird said: “I think more than anything else that we’ve ever done, and especially as it comes ten years down the line for Mundial, it shows how authentic we’ve remained as a brand and how true to our heritage and football heritage we’ve been that Puma would trust us to create our own version of their most iconic boot.”
He added that they didn’t do it “to try and sell millions of football boots. We’re doing it because we think it’s a really cool thing to do with a really cool brand, one that we share a similar ethos.”
But quality is king on any of Mundial’s collaborations: “I feel like everything that we do has to have an authentic story behind it,” Bird said. “Otherwise there’s absolutely no point in us doing it.
“If we try to do something just for units, let’s say, our subscribers who have been there for ten years would call us out straight away and say ‘what are you doing?'”
Events are another key way to get in front of the Mundial readership. The first Hotel Mundial was held in 2018 as a place to watch the World Cup in London’s Brick Lane and it was relaunched for the Euros last summer with elements including a Reebok pub, an Xbox area to play FIFA or EFC, art from previous magazines on the walls, merch, panel talks and live podcasts. The 2025 event generated more than £1m in revenue.
“We work with loads of brands to create a really nice space and there’s programming all afternoon and all evening,” Bird said. “So again, it wasn’t just about the game on the pitch. There were lots of other things happening around it which made it feel more of a 360 immersive genuine experience.”
When it wasn’t a home nation playing, they got in touch with, for example, the local Albanian community to invite them to watch their game and get a free drink.
Bird compared it to bringing to life the “democratic football vision that we have for the magazine”.
In March 2023 Mundial hosted an evening with a panel discussion and music at the SXSW festival with Austin FC.
Bird described being blindsided by meeting a man who knew him as “Birdo” and had an illustration from a children’s book he wrote for Mundial tattooed on his arm, demonstrating the connection readers have with the brand.
Mundial now has an opportunity to embrace US audiences more, Bird said, describing American ‘soccer’ fans as “more diverse and more culty. It hasn’t always been the most popular sport there so they’re maybe the kids in the playground who weren’t necessarily the popular kids, which is really interesting because I think that Mundial resonates with them quite well.”
In addition, he noted: “Every brand on the planet wants a slice of football right now, and that’s because there’s a World Cup in the States. For us, it’s super exciting because we know how authentic and genuine we’ve been in the space for a long, long time, and how many US-based fans we do have, and the magazine definitely resonates with them.”
[Read more: ‘What if Vanity Fair and ESPN FC had a baby?’ Footballco sets out US ambitions]
The digital relaunch was done so Mundial could talk to its readers both more frequently and with a wider reach, letting it go places in the world where people would be put off buying the magazine due to prohibitive print costs.
Bird said publishing one feature a day was a “huge change for us because we have been used to doing ten features every three months and printing it… and that feature has to be of the same quality as what we print in the magazine, otherwise there’s no point”.
It also means they can test different stuff out and react to certain things for which previously they would have had to either wait three months or cover it in an Instagram post.
“What happens if we do start doing some left-field reactive features about matches that happened at the weekend?” Bird put forward. “You’ve got your tactics aficionados over here. You’ve got your mainstream pundits. What can Mundial do about a game that happened at the weekend?
“Is it these are the 20 greatest photographs that were taken by fans from that game, or is it a review of a non-league football stadium that a match happened at at the weekend, rather than a match report on Real Madrid versus Barcelona. So that’s really fun for us, because we’re pushing ourselves and testing ourselves… It means that we can do cool, cultural off-the-pitch features more often.”
Currently the Mundial website has no advertising or branded content, other than a couple of features as part of a wider brand deal.
“If you’re getting people to pay for it, you need to keep it as premium as possible,” Bird said.
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