Roy of the Rovers focus switched to Roy's son Rocky, who also played for Melchester. This publication was short-lived, and folded after only 19 issues. The adventures of the Race family were subsequently featured in the monthly "Match of the Day" football magazine, in which father and son were reunited as manager and player respectively. These strips began in 1997 and continued until the magazine's closure in May 2001. Football-themed stories were a staple of British comics for boys from the 1950s onwards, and Roy of the Rovers was the most popular. To keep the strip exciting, Melchester was almost every year either competing
Roy of the Rovers a striker he comes closer to fitting the "Roy of the Rovers" fantasy than anyone else lately admired by English crowds". Shearer was at that time the leading goal-scorer for "unfashionable" Blackburn Rovers F.C., who were on the verge of winning the Premiership title. Comparisons have been drawn between the fictional Roy Race and the captain of England's 1966 World Cup winning team, Bobby Moore, whose playing career spanned a similar time-scale to that of Roy's. Moore's death in 1993, just days after the last edition of the "Roy of the Rovers" comic was published, produced a "literature of tribute",