Soccer Laduma

What is Soccer Laduma?

Soccer Laduma is a South African football title published weekly in print and through a digital platform branded SNL24. Media24 lists it among its newspaper brands and describes it as “the largest football publisher, across print, web, mobile and social media, in South Africa”, providing “breaking news, interviews, opinion, and in-depth analysis of local and international soccer”.^[1] Media24 also states that “the Soccer Laduma print edition remains South Africa's top-selling sports publication”.^[1] Both descriptions are the publisher's account of its own title, and neither is accompanied on that page by a circulation figure or a date.

It is a single-sport title on a national rather than a niche footing: a weekly with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands at the last audited figure it publishes, addressed to a national football readership rather than to a club or a region.^[2]

What does Soccer Laduma cover?

Football, and within football both the South African domestic professional game and international football, in the forms Media24 lists: breaking news, interviews, opinion and in-depth analysis.^[1] Its weekly rhythm places it differently from the daily newspapers and news sites: its material is interview-led and analytical rather than match-report-led.

Distribution runs across print, web, mobile and social media, and the title's own advertising material presents its social following as part of its offering, citing 2 522 487 Facebook fans, 631 475 followers on Twitter and 290 634 on Instagram, none of them dated on that page.^[2] Social follower counts are not audience measurements and are recorded here as the title's own undated claims.

How large is Soccer Laduma's audience?

The figures the title publishes for itself are attributed to measurement bodies but are old. Its advertising material cites a print circulation of 260 950 from the Audit Bureau of Circulations' second quarter of 2017, and a readership of 3 360 000 from AMPS 2015 A; it also cites web and mobile traffic of 2.4 million unique browsers and 40 million page impressions for August 2018.^[2] The ABC is the non-profit body constituted by advertisers, agencies and media owners whose function is the certification of circulation figures, with random check audits of members' submissions.^[3]

No audited circulation figure for Soccer Laduma later than the second quarter of 2017 could be retrieved, and the title does not appear in the ABC reporting retrieved for the fourth quarter of 2023.^[4] Nor could any currency-measured online figure for the title be retrieved: the most recent month published on the Publisher Research Council's Narratiive report page is April 2022, and Soccer Laduma is not among the sites listed there.^[5]

The market context for reading a 2017 circulation figure is that ABC members' collective circulation fell 7.4 per cent year on year in the fourth quarter of 2023 and ABC membership fell from 448 publications in 2022 to 403.^[4] A figure from 2017 should not be read as a current one.

Since when has Soccer Laduma existed?

Media24 gives 1997 as the founding year, and the title's own advertising material gives the same year.^[1][2] That is the founding of the publication.

Its position within Media24's portfolio is a separate matter from its founding, and no date for the title entering that portfolio could be retrieved. The SNL24 digital branding under which the title's site now operates is likewise a later development whose date could not be established from a retrieved source, so no year is given for it here.^[2]

Why does Soccer Laduma matter in South Africa's sport?

It matters because it is built entirely around football and published on a national footing rather than a regional or club one, and because it has continued to publish a print edition through a period in which several South African print titles ended theirs.^[1][4]

Its weekly form gives it a different function from the broadcasters and the daily sites: interview and analysis material about the domestic professional game, produced independently of the broadcaster that holds the rights to that game.^[1]

What cannot be established from the retrieved evidence is its present scale. The audited circulation the title itself publishes is from 2017 and its readership figure from 2015, and neither the ABC reporting nor the Narratiive readings retrieved for this page carry a more recent measurement of it.^[2][4][5] The publisher's description of it as the top-selling sports publication in South Africa is Media24's, and is not carried here as a measured finding.^[1]