About

By Dave Kidd, Editor, Saturday White Fever

Saturday White Fever is the culmination of my 45 years spent supporting Fulham - and my three decades of covering elite-level sport on Fleet Street. It is the result of the longest love affair I’ll ever know – with Fulham - and the thing which has paid my mortgage for the entirety of my adult life – journalism.

By subscribing, you will receive authoritative, comprehensive, independent coverage of our favourite club, delivered with the passion of a lifelong fan and the expertise of an experienced leading sportswriter who covered six World Cups, a dozen Champions League finals and more than 1,000 Premier League matches.

Saturday White Fever will combine the best of David Lloyd’s much-missed fanzine ‘There’s Only One F in Fulham’ and Peter Rutzler’s coverage of our club in The Athletic – two quality products which are sadly no longer on the market.

We will bring you the best of those two very different models and much, much more. Exclusive interviews and news stories, in-depth match previews and reviews, insight and analysis, humour and nostalgia. All for the monthly price of half a pint in a West London boozer.

Sports journalism has been transformed in recent years. Due to the advent of social media and smartphones, the print product is dying out fast. Young people do not read newspapers. In fact, very middle-aged people don't either.

The need for clicks in the mainstream national media – which I vacated late last year, having been Chief Sports Writer on four different newspapers – means that even an established Premier League club such as Fulham receives precious little meaningful coverage there.

Local newspapers have been systematically decimated too – to the detriment of society as a whole. And certainly to the detriment of those who follow any English football club outside of the Big Six elite.

During my final months at The Sun, that newspaper decided to pool the vast majority of its sports resources towards covering just three clubs – Manchester United, Arsenal and that lot from down the road at Walham Green. So what about the rest of us? What about those who want in-depth coverage of other clubs amid an endless stream of TikTok-style videos, clickbait and rampant shoutiness from ill-informed attention-seekers.

The future of the football-writing industry is, surely, the model championed by CounterPress – a network of independent club-based outlets, run by those who understand and know their clubs deeply. Critical friends of those clubs but never one-eyed cheerleaders. Saturday White Fever is proud to be part of that future vision. Just as I’m proud to support London’s Original - and most maddening - Football Club at football’s most beautiful stadium.

Fulham have never been my local club. They were never my birthright. Although there was black-and-white blood in my family, I chose them - before there was top-flight football at the Cottage, before there was money and well before there was some sort of swanky West End private members’ club on the riverside of the ground.

As a kid from Essex, I would travel past six or seven top-flight clubs in order to watch Fulham play in the old Third Division. Most of my mates supported West Ham, Tottenham or Arsenal. Those who didn’t follow their local clubs, opted for glory-hunting with Liverpool or Manchester United.

I was the weirdo who went across London – in my Uncle John’s car or on Trans-Siberian Railway-style trips almost the full length of the District Line – to watch a third-tier outfit who didn’t have a pot to piddle in.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed victories over Juventus and Hamburg as well as home defeats by Torquay United and Hayes. I’ve seen eight promotions and six relegations. I’ve seen Louis Saha and Peter Baah. The sublime, the ridiculous and all things in between.

Uncle John was also an Essex man but he grew up idolising Johnny Haynes, England’s captain and Fulham’s greatest player. And Haynes, in a John Travolta pose, is Saturday White Fever’s mascot. John took me to Fulham and, soon, love had arrived. The Cottage, the Stevenage Road frontage, the ‘Mullery Is God’ graffiti, the Oxo Dad from the famous TV adverts always standing near us on our spot in the Enclosure.

It was quirky, it was eccentric. Inexplicably, I felt I belonged there, and that feeling has never changed. Every August, after an interminable off-season break, I return and it feels like a spiritual experience. Like heaven to touch.

These days, I have a season ticket in Block H6 of the Hammy End with my son James – middle name Louis, after Saha – and I will continue to watch Fulham home and away from the terraces.

Thankfully, we narrowly avoided Thursday-night European football and Sunday afternoon league games this coming season – otherwise Saturday White Fever wouldn’t really have worked as a title.

But whatever day of the week, the fever always burns. There’s no cure. Can’t take my eyes off of you.