Roy of the Rovers

I used to get Shoot magazine when I was a teenage soccer fanatic. It came from the UK, featured things like player profiles (favourite pre-match meal was always "steak and chips") and a few comic strips. One of them was Hot-Shot Hamish, about a ridiculously strong Scotsman who was forever bursting nets with his mighty thunderbolts. The other was a meant-to-be serious one called Roy of the Rovers. Our hero Roy Race started out as a young lad with Melchester Rovers, and played for the next forty or so years. Quite often we would see Melchester playing against various racially stereotyped European teams (robotic Germans, sneaky Italians, craven French etc).

STOP PRESS: I am starting to think Roy and Hamish were actually in a different paper called Scorcher and Score. Earlier, I tried looking up Score magazine but I would not advise anyone under 18 to do that.

In any case, Wikipedia has this to say about Roy:

To keep the strip exciting, Melchester was almost every year either competing for major honours or struggling against relegation to a lower division. The strip followed the structure of the football season, thus there were several months each year when there was no football. By far the most common summer storyline saw Melchester touring a fictional country in an exotic part of the world, often South America, where they would invariably be kidnapped and held to ransom. The average reader probably stayed with the comic for only three or four years, therefore storylines were recycled; during the first ten years of his playing career, Roy was kidnapped at least five times.