Offside is a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 football

Football (soccer)

Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven players with a spherical ball...

 magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

. It is published six times a year but there are often an extra issue published in connection to larger events, such as the FIFA World Cup

FIFA World Cup

The FIFA World Cup, often simply the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football Association , the sport's global governing body...

. It takes its name from the football law of the same name

Offside (football)

Offside is a law in football which states that if a player is in an offside position when the ball is touched or played by a teammate, he may not become actively involved in the play...

. The magazine was started in March 2000 and had an average circulation of 18,400 in mid-2005. Each edition of around 130 pages has three to five long articles of 10–30 pages and several shorter interviews and reports.

The coverage of the articles include the whole world—from a Flamengo

Clube de Regatas do Flamengo

Clube de Regatas do Flamengo , also known as Flamengo and familiarly as Mengão, is a Brazilian sports club based in the Flamengo bairro, Zona Sul, Rio de Janeiro, best known for its professional football team...

 match in Bolivia

Bolivia

Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...

, to the 2010 FIFA World Cup

2010 FIFA World Cup

The 2010 FIFA World Cup was the 19th FIFA World Cup, the world championship for men's national association football teams. It took place in South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010...

 in South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

, to the lower divisions of Swedish football

Football in Sweden

In Sweden, the most popular sport is association football, with over 240,000 licensed players—of which 56,000 are women—plus another 240,000 youth players. There are around 3,200 active clubs fielding over 8,500 teams, which are playing on the 7,900 pitches available in the country...

 and to the fan culture around FC St. Pauli

FC St. Pauli

Fußball-Club St. Pauli is a German sports club based in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg. The football section is part of a larger club that also has Rugby Fußball-Club St. Pauli is a German sports club based in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg. The football section is part of a larger club that...

—and people that are or have written for Offside include Simon Kuper

Simon Kuper

Simon Kuper is a British author. He writes about sports "from an anthropologic perspective."Kuper was born in Uganda of South African parents in 1969, and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands as a child, where his father, Adam Kuper, was a lecturer in anthropology at Leiden University. He has also...

, Phil Ball

Phil Ball

Phil Ball is a British writer based in Spain. He has lived in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, for almost twenty years. Born in Canada to English parents, Ball grew up in Grimsby on the north east coast of England, having moved there as a child in 1957. As a youngster Ball supported Grimsby Town,...

, Sid Lowe

Sid Lowe

Simon Lowe, better known as Sid Lowe, is a Madrid-based British columnist who has been covering Spanish football for The Guardian newspaper and Guardian Unlimited website since 2001...

, Åke Edwardson

Åke Edwardson

Åke Edwardson is a Swedish author of detective fiction, and was previously a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University, the city where many of his Inspector Winter novels are set...

, Peter Birro

Peter Birro

Peter Birro is a Swedish script writer, poet and musician.In the 1980s and early 1990s, Birro was an obscure poet who performed with the almost equally obscure Swedish band The Christer Petterssons...

 and Thomas Bodström

Thomas Bodström

Thomas Lennart Bodström is a Swedish politician and member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. He was the Swedish Minister for Justice in the two last succeeding governments of the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, from 2000 to 2006. Since October 2006 until October 2010 he was the chairman...

.

The two editors of Offside, Mattias Göransson and Tobias Regnell won the Swedish journalist prize Stora Journalistpriset

Stora Journalistpriset

Stora Journalistpriset is an annual Swedish award, founded in 1966 by Bonnier AB, given to "promote good professional achievements in the field of journalism".The prize money is SEK 100,000 and is awarded in four categories:...

 in 2002 "with knowledge, love and feeling for the game, having moved the borders of sport journalism", and the magazine has been described as "salvation

Salvation

Within religion salvation is the phenomenon of being saved from the undesirable condition of bondage or suffering experienced by the psyche or soul that has arisen as a result of unskillful or immoral actions generically referred to as sins. Salvation may also be called "deliverance" or...

for the 'intellectual supporter'".