What 50 years of buying football programs tells us about yesterday and today
When a match program showed a community and its people as they really were
Cartoon calamity - how Middlesbrough FC tried, unsuccessfully, to change the face of football programs in the late 1970s
Last Thursday night the national Australian football team, the Socceroos, hosted China in a World Cup qualifier at Adelaide Oval.
The Socceroos are not very good at the moment, a handful of players of any merit at best. The best player is Riley McGree, a hardscrabble sort from Gawler on the northern outskirts of Adelaide, the gateway to the Barossa as it likes to be known.
McGree plays his club football in the second tier in England, for Middlesbrough, the team I‘ve followed for exactly 50 years.
It’s against Middlesbrough that I saw China play for the first time, way back in summer 1979.
The reason I know that I went along is because I bought a program as I’ve done with every Middlesbrough match I’ve been to. Some are well thumbed, others are unopened and all sit in deep piles on my study shelves.
When Middlesbrough met China
Rarely do I look at them, and living in Adelaide now, rarely do I add to them but they have morphed from a recording of affection for my team (and some substantial fear too - early on I suspected that stopping collecting would usher in every kind of calamity for the club) into a social and sporting perusal of England over half a century.
There are landmark occasions such as the 1997 FA Cup Final and the 2006 UEFA Cup final in Eindhoven (yes Middlesbrough played in that one) and matches that you sort of knew were significant and have gained greater significance, or smugness, over time.
Kenny Dalglish’s league debut for Liverpool? I was there, August 1977 at Middlesbrough ‘s Ayresome Park when the new European champions showed up.
While my one-eyed supporting meant I would never openly acknowledge any opposition player, time has allowed me a deep appreciation. And bloody hell, Kenny was good. Not quite George Best level but really only one step down. He also scored after just seven minutes at the Holgate end, a typical Dalglish sneak into space inside the area and then into the corner, left foot, 1-0.
Playing against him that day was another future Liverpool superstar and manager, Graeme Souness. I remember because I remember all these things but if I didn’t the program on my shelf would tell me.
Four years later Bestie himself fronted up at Middlesbrough, playing in a testimonial for his Northern Ireland teammate Jim Platt. He was just 35-years-old and ‘Sign him on,’ sang the crowd, wishful thinking that became a near certainty in our minds as paper talk took hold and we waited for the lothario to mutually commit. He never did of course, but I saw him play and have the evidence. Leo and Cristiano have the lot but Bestie was better.
“I’ve only come to see Alan Ball,” said my friend Mark’s dad Gerry one Saturday in 1980 before Middlesbrough v Southampton. He took us to every home match did Gerry and being panic stricken about any upcoming game I didn’t fall for a word of the Bally appeal. Decades on though I’m very pleased indeed that I saw the 1966 World Cup Final man of the match in person. Thanks to the program, I also know the date (8 December) and who partnered Ball in midfield (Steve Williams). For the record, Boro lost 1-0.
England giants Kevin Keegan and Alan Ball rocked up at Darlington FC at Easter 1982 to help save the fourth division club from economic meltdown
Ball popped up in the north-east again a couple of years later, this time for an appeal match (financial) for Darlington FC. Lawrie Mac was bossing Southampton and being local of sorts brought his high flying team to Feethams one Sunday afternoon in April ‘82.
As befitting a club in economic meltdown, the program is 16 pages only, black and white with an occasional, and inexplicable, dab of orange.
Two pages near the back ask us to ‘Meet the players from Southampton and Cleveland Ladies AFC teams’. Low key as it was, the bios are impressive and they all worked full time, a teacher, social worker and banker among the Darlo contingent. Forty years ahead of its time maybe.
We all remember Kevin Keegan turning out that day but the program shows us that Ball played also, as did David Armstrong and Mick Channon. On show for Darlington was David Speedie, pre Chelsea and Scotland just, and a cult hero at Feethams.
With hindsight, there’s a creepy little extra with page 13 devoting itself, in full, to a column from ‘Me Mark Page, Your Radio Tees Breakfast Show DJ’ as he introduces himself. This being the height of the corny, cliched radio celeb, perhaps we should have known something wasn’t right with the man about to join the Radio One roster before later treading the worn path of child abuse and conviction.
Then there’s the elite clubs. In October 1983 some mates were heading to north London for a UEFA Cup match and I tagged along last minute. Spurs v Feyenoord was a decent affair - and Spurs won the cup that season - but turning out in the middle for the Dutch team was Johan Cruyff, arguably the game’s most influential figure ever. Yes, Cruyff of the Cruyff turn at the ‘74 World Cup, the player of that decade bar none and the reason goalkeepers no longer hoof the ball wildly but play out as a fifth defender or libero. Past his best then, yes, but Johan was a standout and he scored.
The next program in the pile also tells me that I went back to see Spurs in a later round, Bayern Munich the visitors and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge turning out for Spurs.
Perplexingly, the Spurs bench has Ossie Ardilles as one of five subs with Richard Cooke and Alastair Dick in the starting 11. There will have been a reason, surely.
On a much lesser note, tagging along with other mates took me to south London in November 1986 and the Wimbledon debut of Vinnie Jones, against Man Utd, 1-0 and Vin the late match winner. Memory has it that there were about 6,000 people present only but I know I was there because I have the program.
They have a greater value though, the programs, and unwittingly and more importantly chart British life and values and aims.
Take my very first match, September 1974 and Middlesbrough versus Chelsea. The program is small and only just in colour, white mostly with some black and red and costing 10p.
Content is decent and there’s a column from the manager Jack Charlton that I assumed, for years, that he spent hours handcrafting himself. It’s obviously personal and catches his tone to a tee but will have taken him the duration of half a bitter and a woodbine to recount to his secretary.
Pen pics and info about the opposition are clearly supplied by the opposition but brought a fount of intricate detail that passed by anyone then who didn’t buy the 10p accessory. Want an edge? Then shell out for a program.
The ads are hyper local before publishing became such a thing. Mega Middlesbrough employer ICI and its GOLD-N slow release fertiliser gets a prime slot as does ‘The Record Shop’ in the Cleveland Centre (whether the simplicity of the name is down to arrogance or lack of ambition or self-awareness we will never know) but Stockton’s Club Fiesta is the standout winner and trails the northern soul superstars Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon, due there for a week long residency from 15 September.
Sure, the football was good then but Johnny Johnson would have been another level
N.B. Given the atrocious taste in music of 1970s footballers, the players will not have tramped down to the Fiesta but many Boro supporters will - high waister flares, star jumpers and loud, wide collared shirts will have been much in evidence at the self styled Vegas of the north nightclub. ‘Back in 1972, customers could secure admission, cabaret seats, a meal and drinks voucher for just £1,’ a quick google tells me. (The best seats at Boro v Chelsea two years later were £1.30 for comparison.) Boro were good then, very good, but the better value would have been at the Fiesta.
Page 5 is devoted to the First Division half time scores which would flash up intermittently, and without warning, on the most cruddy electric hoarding abutting the main stand. It was a bit like morse code, each match assigned a letter, A, B, C and so on and only by buying a program would it make any sense.
The match announcer would later read out the scores but usually only as the teams were returning for the second half and the intel would be lost in a haze of cheers or jeers (the jeers could apply equally to the Boro as well as to the visitors). The program won again.
Five seasons later, the club must have employed a graphic designer on a mind numbingly small salary as the cover photos gave way to a season of drawing the teams in action from apparently never to be forgotten moments. How this lasted nine months was beyond anyone but I was stuck now and carried on buying the merchandise.
Whoever thought opening, let alone reading, an A3 size match program would ever work? Surreal, even at the time
Briefly, in 1983, we flirted with an A3 newspaper style program that proved impossible to open and read on the terraces and the experiment lasted months only. Renamed Boro Fanfare with ‘Rooney’s fish and chip restaurant’ running alongside the masthead, the briefest of pub tests would have saved everyone the grief and embarrassment of publication. I bought every edition but looking now, don’t seem to have opened any of this vintage. Just awful.
The late ‘80s brought a production upswing and by the time the Boro glory days arrived in the mid 1990s, the program had evolved into a glossy corporate sell, thick content, heavyweight advertisers, staged pics and doing very little to touch the heart at all.
By then, fanzines had not only birthed but proliferated and offered far better fayre and insight. Boro’s ‘Fly me to the moon’ came with a scurrilous humour and feel that programs now couldn’t match. But when you’re hooked you can embrace the new but still you’ll stick with the old.
A step up from the A3 came with the Middlesbrough FC fanzine, Fly Me To The Moon. Several steps up in fact
A glossy program today will set you back a small fortune and is little different in content from the official club website or app. It’s no longer a collector’s item but another commercial add-on. And where do you buy them anyway? Decrepit Andy Capp types and 14-year-old scallies who sold the match programs at every corner of the ground - and invariably appeared to operate a ‘one for me one for the club’ approach to taking the punters’ cash - are long gone.
Cheap though meant accessible and a must have. Rarely amid the post match detritus on the terraces would you see a discarded program. Drop it and someone would snaffle it in an instant. I always liked that.
Mapping out the UK by its football clubs might be sneered on in some circles (parental mostly perhaps) but as a way of visiting places you’d never ordinarily go, it is nigh on unbeatable. Rifling through my stash for this story, I found Boro programs from Huddersfield, Port Vale (not easy to find in person), Tranmere and Wolverhampton and more. Sutton? Yes, I’ve been there, FA Cup third round in January 1988. Nil nil and we were lucky.
How the UK maps out in the eyes of many football fans
Onto October 2024 and the Socceroos if you checked out the Adelaide Oval website, fronted up to China (PR) as part of their Round Three AFC Asian Qualifiers™ – Road To 26 Qualification campaign. Even before getting to the end of the sales spiel, it is spiritless tosh.
The match, won 3-1 by Australia, was a World Cup qualifier - one of seemingly dozens making it almost impossible not to make it to north America for the 2026 tournament.
An old match program or fanzine would have told you so much more.
Sure its content could be woefully outdated, although 50 years back most teams had a set 11 and a set substitute for most matches so there was an informal certainty in going to the printers early. Frequent injuries and rotations were not a thing and so the line-up printed on the back page was rarely wrong. Every match began at 3pm also so the scoreboard served its purpose.
And really, how can you beat ads such as Club Fiesta and Rooney’s fish and chip restaurant?
I don’t think you can.
ENDS
Tx Nigel,
Yes I've got the Football League reviews from the 74/75 season certainly. They were a good info source and included in the 10p cover price...
Great read from a great era.
Programmes were the only source of information pre internet. With 12 players inc one sub it was the real place to get the team line ups.
Did Boro ever include the Football League Review in their programmes?