With an increasing number of sports pages devoted to the sport, a number of magazine and countless websites all purporting to cover every angle of the game of football, it is difficult to see any room for new publications.

Yet they come nevertheless. The latest is Football Punk, an offshoot of the successful Golf Punk magazine which is owned by former Liverpool defender Phil Babb. It’s aim, apparently, is to become the “thinking man’s magazine” even though editor Ian Cruise has been reported as saying that there will be features on the “lives of the players and the homes they live in”.

Looking through the first issue of Football Punk, it is hard to see where the thinking comes in. Instead a number of interviews that try to be all blokey (typical question: what would you sing at a karaoke night) that apart from being boring have already been done elsewhere plus a feature on football in Milan that’s so weak that it looks to have been done by a ten year old after a hurried search on the internet.

Of course, however, you accept a couple of weak features here and there if that’s only the backdrop to the serious thing. Sadly, that never happens.

There’s an article on Paul Gascoigne’s internal struggle that is neither original nor interesting, an interview with Fernando Torres that fails to add anything of particular insight, a piece on the problems with criminality that Sven Goran Erikson is likely to encounter in Mexico that is riddled with hearsay plus a much vaunted interview with Harry Redknapp that prefers to pussy foot around rather than ask the sort of questions that would come to mind when talking to the Portsmouth manager.

Ironically, the only piece that really grabbed my attention was an interview with Ryan Giggs which offers a revealing insight on what makes this player such a winner (winning a tenth title was great, but the most important thing was to win it, never mind how many I’ve won before).

The overall impression, however, is quite negative. Or, to put a kinder slant to it, perhaps aimed at a much younger generation, one that feels that Match is too childish but not ready to go for something more serious like When Saturday Comes or Champions.

But there’s an added twist. For the first four issues, Football Punk is being distributed with Golf Punk magazine so I gave that a look as well. And I started to really like the articles which, for someone who has never set foot on a green, let alone tried a round of golf, is saying something.

There’s a real purpose behind the interviews in Golf Punk whilst the ‘serious’ features really do live up to that billing. Of course, there remain a number of articles that try to be all matey whilst there no need for too much thinking in the Bunker Babes’ pages. But so good is the rest of the magazine that you don’t mind them. If Football Punk were to develop into something of this sort, then it would certainly be more than worthwhile.

Which is not to say that it would manage to oust Four Four Two, whose readership would probably make up for Football Punk’s target audience. Indeed, the real problem with Football Punk is probably that of purpose. With Golf Punk it is very clear what that is trying to achieve: offer a fresh and more populist view of golf that appeals to those golfers who like the game but do not necessarily identify with its conservative image.

It is something which Golf Punk does very well and a formula which could have been easily replicated for other sports with a similar image like athletics and tennis. Yet a populist image is not something that football lacks.

A review copy of Football Punk (along with that of Golf Punk) was kindly supplied by the magazines’ publisher JF Media.