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 foreign teams, particularly in the European club competitions, the opposition would often cynically employ overt gamesmanship or downright dirty tactics. Continental sides were considered to be "sneaky": The strip followed the structure of the football season, thus there were several months each year when the Rovers were not playing football, but the strip needed to depict something more exciting than the players going on holiday and then reporting for pre-season training. As a result, the players tended to spend their summers involved in activities such as competing in charity cricket tournaments, but by far the most common summer storyline saw