Trinity Mirror has abandoned plans to launch a national sports newspaper, which had been scheduled for launch at the start of the new football season last month.
The publisher was reported by Media Week to have showed dummy copies of the twice-weekly paid-for title to a number of media agencies during the summer.
The magazine quotes a source as saying that the launch had been shelved because of the big circulation uplift enjoyed by the group's Sunday Mirror and The People after the closure of the News of the World.
But it cites "another well-placed source" who said Trinity's executives "simply decided there was not sufficient advertising support for a dedicated sports title."
National papers in Britain find it hard to persuade media buyers to place adverts on sports pages.
But I have long thought that a really professional sports-only paper could work - if it could find enough advertising support.
I fancied that such a title could have been on the minds of News International executives when they closed the News of the World. Maybe it still is.
Source: Brand Republic/Media Week
