Soccer Night

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This is Soccer Night magazine (zuqiu zhiye), a monthly print spinoff of a popular football program broadcast on Monday nights on CCTV5, China’s national sports channel.

The program shows excerpts of matches from different leagues, both domestic and foreign. The magazine is put together by many of the same journalists as the TV show, and jointly published by CCTV5 and Wuhan Publishing House.

This issue is dedicated to the European Cup, and includes a little booklet (pictured) with all TV broadcast schedules for all the matches. The cover line is European Star Wars.

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The magazine’s content is not as good as Soccer Weekly (see a review on Danwei here): Soccer Night has no cooperative agreements with European and South American magazines so the articles about foreign football tend to be of lower quality. Another factor is that some Chinese football fans find the CCTV sports journalists annoying, which does not help the sales of the magazine.

A notable feature of Soccer Night is that there is no advertising inside the magazine: the only ads are the front and back inside covers, and the back cover.

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