Why Nutmeg magazine scores as celebration of football and print media

This is Nutmeg, a football periodical containing approximately 75,000 words on the Scottish game for people who don’t just want the continuous drip feed of stories about Rangers and Celtic.

Stick your nose inside the pages and you are met by a waft of ink and new paper, an aroma as intoxicating as a plume of mentholated pipe smoke on a frosty night inside a rusting stadium. Read through its pages and you are reminded Scottish football is a colourful, beguiling mosaic. 

If Nutmeg conjures images of a more homespun time in football, it is not by accident. The editorial team makes no apology for its attempts to recapture the nostalgia of football’s bygone era or its celebration of the human side of the game.

Whether it’s a feature on an Archibald Leitch stadium or the match-going experience told by fathers, sons and daughters, Nutmeg celebrates sepia-hued memories, while pondering the state of football in its current guise and everything else between.

There is barely a distinguished football writer in the Scottish football pantheon and beyond who has not graced its pages – Neil Forsyth, Stuart Cosgrove, Hugh MacDonald, Alan Pattullo and Harry Pearson have all appeared – which bears testimony to the esteem in which it is held by its loyal readers and contributors.

Established in 2016 by Ally Palmer – one half of the celebrated newspaper design agency Palmer Watson and a former designer on the desks of Scotland’s best broadsheets – Nutmeg started out as the kernel of an idea, the sort most people who have worked in publishing have had, in response to declining circulation figures.

“The newspaper industry was struggling and I started thinking I want to do something that is producing in, rather than servicing that industry,” recalls Ally.

“I was thinking at the time: ‘what are the two things I love the most?’ One was working with type and design and the other Scottish football. I did a Kickstarter and the response was incredibly encouraging considering all people were seeing was a logo and a kind of brief outline. We got about 420 people pledged to that with varying amounts, from one copy through to the first four.”

Readers now number in the thousands. Palmer admits a great deal of the success is down to his decision to bring in football writer Daniel Gray as the editorial brains. Gray’s emotive writing and deft touch allied to Palmer’s eye for design have become the hallmarks of Nutmeg’s winning formula.

The pair first met in an Edinburgh bookshop after being introduced by a friend and their initial conversation convinced them Nutmeg had a chance.

“We were actually sat next to a Proclaimer at that first meeting but because we couldn’t work out which one he was we didn’t approach him – it would have been good to get him on board,” recalls Dan. 

Daniel and Ally with issue number 29 of Nutmeg

“I felt immediately Ally wanted something that celebrated the best in the game. Nutmeg is still very honest about Scottish football and can be critical but it comes from a position of wanting to celebrate the good in the game whether that is the heritable old stands, the way a club means so much to a community here, right through to celebrating great footballers of the past. 

“Much like Ally, I grew up with print and I am saddened by the demise of it.”
Did leaving newspapers for self-publishing not feel rather like jumping from the frying pan into the fire shortly after dousing oneself in petrol? 

“It was a struggle right at the beginning,” recalls Ally. “I had to learn very quickly how to become a publisher. Issue 1 didn’t have a big No 1 on it because I didn’t know if there was going to be a No 2 but the first issue sold out, which I didn’t expect either. 

“In fact, I forgot to put the stock amount in the website shop so we ended up selling more copies than we had actually printed so I had to go back to about 150 people and apologise profusely. But there has always been that goodwill in terms of subscribers and contributors. Contributors believe in it and there’s no doubt people subscribe to something because they believe in it.”

It’s not just that buy-in that explains Nutmeg’s success, however. 

“There’s just not enough written about the rest of Scottish football,” says Ally. “Nutmeg is eclectic and that’s where print works really well. We don’t ignore Rangers and Celtic but the whole basis of Nutmeg is stories about football; if we get stories about Celtic and Rangers, brilliant, but we don’t seek out that type of content. We are not driven by the market as such. We are like the 1980s football fanzine boom. I suppose it’s the ability to do it – I’m sitting here today talking to you into the computer which Nutmeg is built on, it’s as simple as that.”

Gray continues the theme and alights on a reason why he believes Nutmeg has flourished in an environment that the doom-mongers would have us believe is at death’s door.

“There’s a certain type of person who likes ‘a thing’, ‘an object’ and as football increasingly moves away from match day programmes and things like that there’s a space for that plonk through the letterbox and you sit back with a cuppa,” he says. “It’s not to say we are not modern people, increasingly we’ll be putting more things online, more podcasts, more video, but that’s with the aim of tempting people across to print.”

Later this year, Nutmeg will publish its 30th edition, a notable anniversary. Seven years and more than two million words after that meeting in a bookshop, Nutmeg reaches a landmark in rude health and with plans for expansion.

“Short term and medium term we desperately want to grow sales more, we don’t think it reaches half of the market out there,” says Dan.

It is comforting to hear both men speak so passionately about print’s future. In Ally’s case, Nutmeg is the culmination of a dream, having heeded a voice heard during his earlier newspaper days.

“When I used to work at Scotland on Sunday, the design desk was just across from the sports desk and there would sit Graham Spiers, Kevin McKenna, Kevin McCarra and Neil Drysdale and I would hang about the desk most days because that’s where I wanted to be, instead of designing magazines. I wanted to be involved. And now I have conversations with people about football, what’s not to like about that? 

“It’s been such a pleasure.”

www.nutmegmagazine.co.uk