text: Following the closure of the weekly title in 1993, the strip appeared in a relaunched monthly publication in September that year, with grittier storylines intended to attract teen and young adult fans who had read the weekly comic in their youth. Between January 1994 and January 1995, the monthly strips were mirrored by a weekly edition in Shoot magazine, which had in the late 1980s published a parody called Ray of the Rangers. The relaunched Roy of the Rovers comic ended in 1995.
  Match of the Day
  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 that were more realistic".  This series ran until 2001.
  Re-issues and collections
  Then-rights holder Egmont published a 64-page "collectors edition" of the comic strip in April 2009, gathering together a number of 1980's era Roy of the Rovers stories in addition to other backup strips from the comic. Two 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.