About Goles

Goles

Goles was a weekly football magazine published in Buenos Aires by the publishing group of Julio Korn. It belonged to a family of popular weeklies that, by the mid-1960s, dominated the Buenos Aires kiosk trade, alongside Radiolandia, Antena, Vosotras, TV Guía and Anteojito. Within that group, Goles was the sporting title, and within sport it was overwhelmingly a football title. Contemporary descriptions of the magazine recorded that about 95 percent of its pages were devoted to football coverage, a proportion that set it apart from its older rival El Gráfico, which had been founded as a broader illustrated sports magazine. Goles spoke directly to the supporter who followed the Primera División week by week, and it built its reputation on speed, price and closeness to the matchday experience rather than on literary prestige.

Origins in the Korn publishing empire

The magazine was founded in Buenos Aires by Julio Korn through his Editorial Deportiva, part of Editorial Korn. The verified seed record for this profile dates the foundation to 1950, but research in Argentine sports-press histories and in the Centro para la Investigación de la Historia del Fútbol (CIHF) places its first appearance earlier, in 1948, and that earlier date is the one most consistently supported by the surviving secondary literature. The discrepancy is recorded openly here: Goles was already appearing at the end of the 1940s, whether its formal organisation under Editorial Deportiva is dated to 1948 or to 1950, and by the early 1950s it was an established Tuesday weekly. Korn's business model was well documented. He aimed deliberately at a mass, popular readership, kept cover prices lower than those of prestige competitors, and accepted a cheaper, distinctive production — including a characteristic sepia-toned printing noted by historians of the magazine — in order to reach very large print runs. That formula had already made Radiolandia a market leader in entertainment journalism, and Goles applied the same logic to football.

A Tuesday magazine built around the weekend

Goles appeared weekly on Tuesdays. The timing was central to its identity. It reached kiosks shortly after the weekend's Primera División fixtures had been played, while the matches were still the subject of argument in cafés, workplaces and stadiums. Stadium loudspeaker advertising promoted it with a jingle remembered by the CIHF history — “Revista Goles para mí, revista Goles para ti, revista Goles para todos” — which underlined how directly the magazine was marketed inside football grounds themselves. Its cover at first presented it as “La revista del fútbol argentino” (“The magazine of Argentine football”). In May 1955, in issue number 363, that slogan changed to “La revista del deporte argentino” (“The magazine of Argentine sport”), after the magazine had broadened its coverage to include other disciplines. The change of slogan did not change its essential character. Football remained the centre, and other sports appeared around it.

Contents and regular features

The core of each issue was commentary on the championship matches. Match reports were accompanied, in the format remembered by historians and former readers, by boxed comments carrying the opinions of the team captains, a device that gave readers a voice from inside the dressing room alongside the journalist's account. Goles also covered boxing, motor racing and other sports in smaller proportions, and in time it added information on the Spanish and Italian first divisions, reflecting the strong interest of Argentine readers in European football and in Argentine players abroad. Regular features included readers' letters in the Correo de Lectores and a Correo Deportivo, interviews with sporting figures, and a back-page feature, “Risas y lágrimas de un crack” (“Laughter and tears of a star”), presented in comic-strip panels, which told the life story not only of footballers but of other sportsmen and women. A page carrying the following Sunday's Primera División fixtures, repeated in a grid, allowed readers to play the weekly forecasting game then known in the press as Pronósticos Deportivos or the “Polla semanal”, a forerunner in popular use of the later PRODE. The magazine understood its readers as participants, not only as spectators.

The golden period of the 1960s

Histories of the Argentine sports press agree that Goles had its golden period in the 1960s. Under the direction of the respected journalist and commentator Enzo Ardigó, for a long period its director, and with Horacio García Blanco also in a leading editorial role in that decade, the magazine overtook its rivals in circulation. One academic survey of El Gráfico, Mundo Deportivo and Goles records that in the 1960s Goles came to triple El Gráfico in circulation. That achievement was remarkable because El Gráfico, founded in 1919, carried enormous prestige and was often called the bible of Argentine sport. Goles beat it, for a time, not by imitating its literary chronicle tradition but by being cheaper, faster and more exclusively focused on the football the majority of readers followed. Its leadership lasted until the end of the 1960s, when, according to the same survey, a fire in its workshops caused the magazine to disappear from kiosks for a period and weakened its position.

Football culture and social coverage

Because it followed football so closely, Goles also became an incidental record of the social history of the Argentine game. Its coverage extended beyond the men's professional championship. In 1959, for example, the magazine gave prominent cover treatment to a women's football match, a benefit game at Tigre between a team from Barrio Parque in Ingeniero Maschwitz and San Justo de Benavídez, under the headline treatment typical of its era. Historians of women's football in Argentina cite that 1959 cover as an early landmark in the press visibility of the women's game, and several players from the Tigre circle of that period later formed part of the Argentine squad that played at the 1971 World Cup in Mexico. Goles also covered the children's football championships of the Peronist period, the Campeonatos Infantiles Evita, alongside El Gráfico. When the championship season ended, the magazine traditionally offered extensive coverage of the long tours — lasting one to two months — that the big Argentine clubs then undertook in Europe and the Americas, and in a practice characteristic of the period, the correspondent for a tour was often a player of the touring team itself; the CIHF history records that on Boca Juniors' European tour of January and February 1954, the correspondent was the Paraguayan centre-forward Rubén Fernández Real.

Competition with El Gráfico and Mundo Deportivo

To understand Goles, historians usually place it in a triangle with El Gráfico and Mundo Deportivo. El Gráfico represented the established, illustrated, literary model of sports journalism. Mundo Deportivo, linked to the sporting policies of the Peronist state, had presented sport through a social and political lens, widening access and participation, before changing its line abruptly after the fall of Peronism in 1955 and finally disappearing in 1959. Goles represented a third model: a commercially driven, popular, football-first weekly whose success rested on price, timing and identification with the ordinary supporter. The comparison matters because it explains why a magazine with less prestige could, for a decade, sell more copies than the most famous sports magazine in the Spanish-speaking world. Goles did not try to be a general cultural magazine. It tried to arrive on Tuesday, cost less, and tell the football reader exactly what had happened at the weekend.

Place within the Korn group

By the mid-1960s, a contemporary profile of Julio Korn's empire in Primera Plana, preserved in the Magicas Ruinas archive, described six Korn weeklies — Radiolandia, Antena, Goles, Vosotras, TV Guía and Anteojito — competing with each other for first place in the market, with millions of copies gathered each month for distribution to some seven thousand kiosks in Buenos Aires alone. Korn was quoted in that profile as saying that his intention was always to reach the great mass of the people, not to instruct them but to entertain them, and that luxury publications did not interest him because they circulated little, while a large print run lowered costs. Goles fitted that philosophy precisely in the sporting field. Its sepia pages and low price were not accidents of limited resources; they were the visible form of a deliberate mass-market strategy that, in football, proved for a time more powerful than prestige.

Later years and the limits of the record

The detailed later chronology of Goles is less fully documented in the sources available for this profile than its 1950s and 1960s history, and this profile states that limit openly rather than inventing a precise closing date or final issue number that cannot be verified from reliable sources. What is verified is the arc: founded at the end of the 1940s, established as a Tuesday weekly under Enzo Ardigó, slogan broadened in 1955, market leader in the 1960s with circulation reported at three times that of El Gráfico, and weakened after a workshop fire at the end of that decade caused an interruption in its appearance. Researchers who need an exact final date should consult the hemeroteca collections that hold the magazine itself, because secondary summaries consulted for this profile do not agree on a single terminal date and do not support stating one with confidence.

Legacy

Goles left a legacy out of proportion to the modesty of its materials. For historians of Argentine journalism, it demonstrated that a specialised, popular, single-sport weekly could defeat a general sports institution on its own ground. For historians of football, its match reports, captains' boxes, fixture grids and tour correspondence preserve the weekly rhythm of the Argentine championship in the decades when radio and the kiosk magazine, rather than television and the internet, structured how supporters relived the weekend. For historians of women's and children's football, its covers and reports preserve early evidence that later research has used to reconstruct parts of the game that official records neglected. It was, in its own time, simply the magazine supporters bought on Tuesday. That ordinariness was its strength, and it is why Goles remains a necessary name in any directory of Argentine magazines.