Roy of the Rovers "Best of Roy of the Rovers" books, featuring successive runs of strips from the 1980s and 1970s, were published in June 2008 and 2009 respectively. As of August 2016, Roy of the Rovers and the rest of the Fleetway comics library is owned by Rebellion Developments. The story followed Roy Race, a striker for the fictional football team Melchester Rovers, based in a town of the same name in an unspecified part of England, where Roy lived with his family. In the first episode, a teenaged Roy and his best friend, Blackie Gray, signed for the Rovers after being spotted
Roy of the Rovers edition in "Shoot" magazine, which had in the late 1980s published a parody called Ray of the Rangers. The comic strip was resurrected in July 1997, printed as short (usually two-page) features in the BBC's monthly "Match of the Day" magazine. These strips ran until the magazine's demise in May 2001. By then the strip's wholesome tone, often espousing the virtues of fair play and strong moral character, was beginning to seem old-fashioned. The editor of "Roy of the Rovers" comic, Barrie Tomlinson, has commented that "everyone seemed to be growing up a bit more quickly, and they wanted stories