A football magazine, with its next edition dedicated entirely to Jamaica’s football, is expected to hit newsstands in North American and Jamaica “in the next couple of weeks”, says its publisher and editor.

Aldwyn McGill, a Trinidad-born Canadian, told the Sunday Observer that putting into a print a special edition of Star Soccer Review targeting the island’s football has always been a dream of his and he now waits to see how corporate Jamaica and the sport’s constituency will respond to the project.

“My driven passion was to do the Jamaica issue as Jamaicans have been the ones that have really helped me in my career in Toronto… but the Jamaican one was hard as initially I wasn’t getting the support, but I am just happy that I have the health and strength to take it to where it’s at right now,” he said on a recent visit to the Observer’s Beechwood Avenue headquarters.

If the mock-up of the Jamaica issue is anything to go by, then Star Soccer Review’s seventh edition is bound to provide readers with a variety of topical and exciting matters related to Jamaica’s football, from the Reggae Boyz all the way down to the nursery level.

A bi-annual magazine in glorious gloss and full colour, Star Soccer Review hopes to print some 5,000 copies of the Jamaican issue, but McGill warned THAT that will depend on the support he gets from interest groups in Jamaica.

” The last national issue we did 5,000 as we had to satisfy Canada… the T&T issue we did 3,000; for the Jamaica issue in terms of quantity, we will have to make a decision in the next couple of weeks,” said the former Trinidad and Tobago national invitee.

McGill, a retiree from telecoms giant Bell Canada after serving it for 29 years, said the publication continues to struggle to secure sustainable advertising support and has stayed above water by his unbridled desire to see it succeed and the unwavering loyalty of some core readers.

“It’s a passion I am pursuing and I have kept going though advertisement has not been there… and we are more relying on sales through a national distributor and it’s in public spaces and in the airports.

“We hope people are still enthused with the magazine even if the advertising is not there as we try to keep it a quality product with lots of colours and substance,” said McGill, who emigrated to Canada in 1974 at the very moment he was called to the Trinidad squad in preparation for the Germany World Cup.

McGill, who got endorsement by the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) and who presented its president Captain Horace Burrell a mock-up of the forthcoming edition, said the magazine was an evolution from a website he started back in 2004.

“The inspiration behind Star Soccer Review came after retirement in 2004 when I developed a website which was Caribbean Stars, and from there I started writing for the newspaper, and having the website and writing for the newspaper, I decided to put all that information in print,” he said.

But even as his knowledge of the print business was lacking, McGill used every tool at his disposable to improve on his understanding of an industry that is dying a slow death, with stark reminders of its failures occurring in the very North American markets he has targeted with the worldwide recession.

“Doing the magazine and always wanting to learn the business, I bought other football magazines, and there is no magazine that is as detailed as ours; it’s just the advertising that’s different, and they may have more pages, plus they publish more regularly like every month,” he noted.

McGill thinks Star Soccer Review can survive in the tough and competitive world of printed literature because quality and substance, he boasts, is the name of his game.

“Everybody knows we have a quality magazine. As a matter of fact, we have started to attract some interest from big clubs in Canada, who recognise the magazine now as the vehicle for scholarships as the young players are getting exposure in it,” he told the Sunday Observer.

The former Bell Canada technician said his vision for the magazine rests in essence on the focus on the youth in football across all levels.

“My vision right now is driven by the youth programmes, and as you can see in the magazine, are profiles on Jamaican and Canadian kids and we intend to get into the schools …

“We will be doing everything to get the youths of the Caribbean communities covered so the youngsters can have more respect for themselves and the game and then graduate from there,” he said.

Though he has not been able to pay, McGill was been able to put together “a team of reputable football writers” from around the CONCACAF to contribute to the magazine.

And apart from covering the inescapable costs of printing, there’s little else he has been able to pay for as the magazine business defrocked and showed its naked truth of being an expensive and complex industry with little or no guarantees.

“Once the magazine continues to grow, then we will be able to pay these people… we used to pay a guy to do the graphics, but we could no longer afford that and now my daughter does it as she recently graduated in that field… if we can get the ads I have no doubt that we could go fully professional,” said McGill.