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 Football Programme Collecting -
Part One: By D Langston 15th Feb 2010

Perhaps the most common form of collecting a football supporter might take up is that of collecting all the match dayprogrammes they attend or all the home football programmes of their favorite club. Well lets face it with the price of them today you don’t really want to bin them anyway. But how did they get to what they are today and why do people still collect them?

Football programmes have had a mixed life, starting as a simple team sheet of players names way back in 1890s, Manchester and Everton being some of the first clubs to produce a publication. Others quickly followed as they saw income could be generated by the placing of a few sponsors adverts from the local shops and service in and around the local area. But soon fans wanted more and they began to become a form of communication between supporters and club officials in the form of directors notes.

In the space of perhaps just ten years the football programme had grew to ten pages for a lot of club and even bigger from major clubs like Aston Villa. The first issue of The Villa News Dated Sept 1st 1906 had two colour covers surround 14 pages packed with club info. An advert for Rover Cycles on the cover, not the Rover that that we all saw die recently but the very first geared bicycle. Before this the wheels on all bicycles turned the exact revolution as the peddles (fixed wheel).

Inside the Villa programme the is already images of the players and write ups too. Along with stats, future fixtures and loads of football news you can see why supporters eat them up at the time. Even Though, the focal point for today’s fans was missing – No mention of a managers or notes he may have written.

The reason being that back then the term manager didn’t actually exist, most clubs where run as any other social club. It wasn’t really until the 40-50s that the role of a single person picking the team and deciding which players to bring in became popular, in fact Alf Ramsey was perhaps England’s first real manager. Before that the committee decided on all things football. The managers role developed out of what was then termed the secretary. It was his job to organise the players and make sure they got to the ground, had their kit and in fact 20-30 years earlier not even much effort was put into training players let alone tactics. Anyway I digress, back to football programmes in the next part.