Daily Sport (defunct – to be relaunched?)

The Daily Sport was launched in 1991 as the weekday companion of the Sunday Sport, which was first published some five years earlier. (This is unusual; more commonly it’s the Sunday edition of a paper which comes later to fill the gap in a daily’s publication schedule.)

The Sport was an unapologetically trashy tabloid, with no pretensions at all to hard news coverage (even the Daily Star has some political items, even if very sketchily covered). There was almost zero news content, and what news there was was generally outlandish, “Double decker bus found on the Moon!!!”-style stuff – but to make up for that, there were plenty of soft porn pictures and adverts for “adult” chatlines.

It was founded by pornographer and former Birmingham City FC co-owner David Sullivan but was sold by him in 2007 and was then published by Sport Newspapers Ltd, part of the Sport Media Group plc.

Both the Daily Sport and the Sunday Sport were relaunched in April 2008 under the editorship of Barry McIlheney and James Brown. However, SMG had to turn to David Sullivan and the Gold Group for a £1.68m bailout in 2009 after running into financial difficulties; Sullivan became the “honorary publisher”.

Besides the conventional website given below, there was also a WAP site at http://www.dailysport.mobi/.

The Daily Sport‘s publication was suspended from 1 April 2011 after Sport Media Group ceased trading and appointed administrators. Although David Sullivan stepped in and rescued the Sunday Sport together with some of the former employees in a private joint venture, the Daily Sport didn’t form part of the deal. It thus became the UK’s first daily national newspaper to cease publication since Eddy Shah’s Today folded in 1995 after just nine years in print.

As of June 2011 the name “Daily Sport” and the domain dailysport.co.uk were owned by Daily Sport Limited, with a relaunch being trailed on the home page. But no date was given for the relaunch, nor was it clear from the website that there would be a print publication as well, although various reports suggested that there would be.

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