The buying and reading of football programmes used to be a staple part of any matchday.
For generation after generation, spanning a century and more, grounds large and small would be peppered with stalls and vendors, selling single sheets of paper in the very early days detailing the team line-ups, and then much later glossy magazines.
Across almost all of football’s long and - mostly - illustrious history, matchday programmes have featured, beloved by some, taken for granted by others, but always there, always offering up something to do to help while away boring minutes prior to kick-off, or post-wee and a leg stretch at half-time.
Whether seated or standing leaning against a crush barrier or hoarding it was such a familiar sight growing up, spectators idly flicking through a publication they bought ritually on entering the stadium.
They’d scan the manager’s notes nonplussed, or an article from the club historian bringing to life an interesting prior meeting with that afternoon’s opponents.
There would typically be two or three pages devoted to the visitors, filled with generic information sourced from other media, in more recent times the internet.
And without fail the local community would be highlighted in photographs and the minimum of prose. It was often a charitable event with a player in attendance. Or a school minibus, partly funded by the club.
Nobody really paid any attention to the team-sheet at the back, the original reason for a programme’s existence, because they were notoriously unreliable. The impressive visiting number nine could conceivably have been loaned in a week earlier and not even be included.
And once the whistle blew, they would be folded and stuffed into back pockets, or maintained as best could to keep them in pristine condition.
This latter act brings us to an interesting truth about football programmes, that they have two distinctly different lives.
First they are practical, merely serving a purpose. They are one of the three Ps that are the sacred tenets of going to a game - a programme, pie and a pint.
Then, stored away in a drawer somewhere, along with the rest, they become artifacts to a Saturday afternoon, a result, a moment in time that brought us happiness or despair. They become physical memories that years later take us right back.
Or, if handed down, we see what our dads saw. Glimpse a world long gone that to him was the norm.
Because poring through programmes from the Sixties and Seventies is to open up a time capsule, one full of adverts for Watneys Party Seven and Esso, Double Diamond and Castrol. It was pretty much exclusively booze, petrol and motor oil.
And then there’s the grainy photographs of the players from yesteryear, not just the greats that today would feature prominently in the football betting, but obscure centre-backs, hardened and looking about 65 years old, winning aerial duels sporting a haircut so ridiculous it has never come back into fashion.
Sadly, it is in the past where predominantly programmes now reside, with sales of them steadily declining in the 21st century to the point where nearly a quarter of Championship clubs, for example, no longer even produce them.
Elsewhere, content is outsourced to fans who do it purely for the love while on matchdays it is becoming increasingly hard to locate a stall, or a vendor inside.
A survey conducted last year revealed that a little over 10% of attendees at games purchase a matchday programme. Once, it was four times that number.
Perhaps the first death knell arrived via the fanzine explosion of the Eighties, a phenomenon that instantly made programmes look staid and too closely aligned to the club. But a fundamental change in our matchday habits is the biggest reason, for sure.
Whereas we used to rely on reading material to inform, and to fill time until kick-off, now we’re on our phones, checking the live betting markets, and crucially checking too the team line-ups.
What good is a list of players printed days ago, when we can go online and discover precisely why our favourite player is starting on the bench.
As programmes increasingly go digital it is perhaps all-too-easy to believe that a social evolution has taken place, one that cannot be reversed because regardless of want or mournful nostalgia, times change.
But as always when modern football sheds another layer of its past, it is not what is lost that is most missed, but what it represented. What came with it.
So it is that future generations won’t be able to open up a drawer, one belonging to an older sibling or parent, and take out a bunch of programmes. To touch them and turn the very pages of time. To explore football’s past in a real sense, not simply from word of mouth.
The front cover may have 2d, 30p, 80p or a pound in the top right-hand corner. But really that’s priceless.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
