Sunday Sport bolsters non-Premier League coverage

Sunday Sport is to launch a weekly supplement called the Championship and Football League Review in a bid to position itself as the newspaper for the grassroots fan.
The 12-page pull-out, which launches this weekend, will become the home of all the paper's non-Premier League coverage with all regular sports page coverage given over to stories around the top-flight competition.

It will include a new column by Barry Fry contain in-depth match reports, match statistics, gossip from all of the games in the Championship and Leagues One and Two.

Sunday Sport said that the soaring costs of attending matches means that "many fans are being priced out of the Premier League and are turning to lower league football".

"The Championship and Football League has been somewhat neglected by other newspapers and we aim to reverse that trend and give the smaller clubs, who struggle week in and week out to survive in this cut-throat business, a voice," said the Sunday Sport editor Paul Carter.

"The lower leagues offer a much more attractive proposition in terms of affordability, excitement and value for money and we aim to reflect that in this pull-out."

He added that the launch of the pullout "firmly establishes the Sunday Sport as the newspaper for the grassroots fan".

Sunday Sport, recently bought by Interactive World, nudged its circulation up slightly month on month by 0.15% to 92,803, in Audit Bureau of Circulations figures released last week for the month of August. However, the title was still down 13.65% year on year.

In the battle of the Sunday red-tops, all publishers are aiming to replicate the performance of the Daily Star Sunday.

The paper recorded a massive 26.45% increase in year-on-year sales to easily crack the 500,000 mark, in ABC figures for August.

Richard Desmond's red-top title also recorded a 24% month-on-month circulation rise to 533,248.

Mark Sweney
Wednesday September 12, 2007
MediaGuardian.co.uk