Official Programme of the 1970 World Cup

A cheery red cover invites you to thumb through the 66 pages of this souvenir programme created as a guide to the 1970 World Cup. Priced at just six shillings (or 30p for any Brits harbouring decimal thoughts a year ahead of their time), this was the official handbook guaranteed to help you get the most out of the FIFA’s ninth global tournament.


Or at least two-thirds of it was. Some 23 pages were set aside for adverts, thus proving that rampant commercialism isn’t as new as you think. But what adverts – some for official partners like British Leyland (England’s coach providers), some for popular brands of the day like Mobil oil, and some for utterly random items like Action Man dolls (complete with sporting outfits, mark you). Even the Esso 1970 World Cup Coin Collection gets a look in.

But never mind that, I hear you cry – what sort of useful information could I find inside such an august publication? Well once we’ve been informed who makes up the World Cup Organising Committee, we’re given a short history of the competition translated into four languages. Throughout the programme, everything’s available in English, French, Spanish and German and printed in black, blue, pink and black again respectively.

After that, there are details about the previous tournaments, the qualifying results for the 1970 Finals and the ever-useful fixture list for the sixteen teams taking part.

Then it’s onto an illustrated profile of those teams and the stadia they were due to play in. Taking one group at a time, we get a black and white photograph of each venue plus a line up for each squad with monochrome images of six of the players.

Here we realise the limitations brought about by a lack of colour – and the lack of a photographer. The harsh Mexican sunlight means the likes of V Pereda and I Calderon are shown half-and-half in extreme brightness and shadow. The Swedish players look like they’ve had their photos taken at the local police station, while Bulgaria’s finest appear so dim and grainy as to be barely identifiable at all.

Yet it’s the Czechoslovakian team that causes most concern. Their team are depicted not photographically but as a series of paintings the like of which wouldn’t look out of place in the waiting room of a mental institution. Whether the budget ran out to pay for a measly six photos at the headquarters of the Czech FA we’re not quite sure, but it’s safe to say even an 80-year-old Spanish woman could have done a better job than this.

Finally at the back, there are pages where you can fill in all the scores of the matches as the tournament progresses plus the player line-ups for the two competing finalists. All in all, a curious mix of content which, it could be said, lacked the excitement brought about by Pele, Banks and their ilk, but nonetheless tried valiantly to build on the success of the previous tournament four years before.

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Attic Kits Feature in Coventry City Matchday Programme

Today is a very proud day for The Football Attic and in particular, the Rich (@sofa_soccer) shaped half.

In today's Coventry City Matchday Programme for the game against Bury, 3 of my fantasy kit designs are showcased to all who buy a copy. As someone who, like Chris, spent hours of his teenage years designing kits, to have them in your home team's programme is just fantastic!


Before I go into how this came about, I want to say a big thank you to Derek and Gary of the brilliant Got, Not Got, for it is they who made this all possible. For those of you who may have missed it, we interviewed the Godfathers of Retro back in February.


Last year, I posted on twitter my ideas for a new CCFC kit, which garnered a mostly positive reception. GNG got in touch and mentioned they were doing a few features in the CCFC programme and if I sent them the designs, they might be able to get them in. I winged them over and a few weeks ago, Derek got back in touch to say they'd be featured in an upcoming issue. Derek also suggested I create a 3rd one, perhaps based around Cov's infamous use of the colour brown. Being a fan of those Coventry shirts, this gave me the perfect chance to combine the colour scheme with my favourite ever CCFC kit design...the 1987/89 Hummel outfit. I quickly put it together along with some words to accompany the kits and then tried to stop grinning before my jaw fell off.

Courtesy of GNG / CCFC Matchday Programmes

Last night, I downloaded the electronic edition of PUSB (Play Up Sky Blues) and eagerly flicked to page 13 and THERE THEY WERE!!!! I quickly read the whole article, grin back in full effect :-D

While I have never been a collector of programmes, my overriding memories of them being more the advert for Steve Earle than anything else, I do always get one when I go to a match and I have to say, putting aside any CCFC bias I may have here, that I do think Cov's programme is great. So often I've found reading a matchday prog to be a chore, rather than a joy with way too much of what seems to be filler or ads, but the CCFC one is rammed with actual proper articles. Oh and the front covers on this year's issues are brill! I HAVE to get one of those away tops!


The article can be seen above, but before I show you the kits in full, I'd like to again say a huge thanks to Got, Not Got and to Coventry City's Matchday Programme for making a teenage boy's dream come true...no, not the one about Janet Ellis ;-)

And so, the kits in full:

Home

Away

3rd

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FA Cup Final Programme, 1980

A quick skim through the Official Souvenir Programme of the 1980 FA Cup Final shows that it was a mixed bag of trivia, some of it dry, some of it brilliantly evocative.

Inside, we first see the Timetable and Programme of Events for May 10th 1980. The running order for the biggest afternoon in English football had a familiar feel; marching regimental bands at 1.10pm, the marching band of Kansas State University at 1.35, more from the regimental bands of the Guards' Division at 2.30 and again at half time, Abide With Me at 2.45 and The Duke of Duchess of Kent shaking hands with the players at 2.50. So far, so regimented.

On page 5, we get a word from Ted Croker, FA Secretary, who speaks of the growing trend for Second Division clubs to do well in the FA Cup Final (Sunderland and Southampton being recent examples at the time). This was a good omen for West Ham although, as Croker said, Arsenal "seemed to have reserved a permanent place at Wembley. This will be the club's third Wembley Final in succession – a record…" He signed off by telling readers that the Final would "be seen on TV in over 60 countries" and by hundreds of millions of people. It would probably have been more were it not for all those regimental marching bands showing up every five minutes.

Further inside the programme, there are detailed club profiles on Arsenal and West Ham along with full colour pictures of the two teams, in case you'd forgotten what they looked like. Furthermore, there are double-page profiles of the two teams to give some detail on the playing staff in each case. We're told that "in August 1977, [Pat Jennings] joined Arsenal from neighbours Tottenham Hotspur. Would Spurs have let him go for £45,000 if they had known he would play for their greatest rivals at Wembley in 1978, 1979 and 1980?" Probably not, but there again if my aunt had balls, would she be my uncle? The answer to both questions is likely to be the same.

The FA Cup Final programme of 1980 serves as much as a condensed reference book as any kind of souvenir. There are pages devoted to previous Cup Final results, Cup Facts ('compiled by Jack Rollin') and Goals Galore ('Scoring feats from past FA Cup Finals') but aside from the statistics and the plentiful colour action photos of both teams, the real charm can found in the filler material. Here, we get a perfect snapshot of the era through the adverts dotted willy-nilly throughout.

There's one for the Sunday Mirror featuring "Kevin Keegan of England and Hamburg – soon Southampton" who was writing a column for the weekend tabloid at the time. Keegan also cropped up in a small advert for Mitre Sports, alongside another for Adidas bearing a tiny caption telling us that Umbro International (Footwear) Ltd were "the sole UK distributors of Adidas products." Quite a sporting gesture on the part of the future England kit suppliers in more ways than one.

Elsewhere, there's an advert for the Victor range of men's toiletries - a useful reference for anyone wondering whether Brut 33 was the low point in male grooming products at the start of the 1980's. Another advertises Skol, surely as ubiquitous in pubs back then as pictures of topless models on Big D peanut dispensers and a predilection for cirrhosis of the liver and lung cancer among the regulars.

But for those wanting a lasting memory of a wonderful day at the FA Cup Final, page 48 of the programme was where it was all happening. There it was possible to choose your commemorative gift to remind you of the big day from a range of Wembley branded products. Blue and white wrist band? Certainly – that'll be 90p. How about a "slide card" as a pocket size-record of all FA Cup Final matches since 1872? No problem – 55p.

And if the 'Italian-made sports bag' didn't take your fancy (despite being made from 'durable nylon - £4.99') there was always the opposite page featuring 8mm soccer home movies. Two hundred feet of celluloid bliss – some even with sound – from just £8.30. What more could a football fan want? Perhaps a ticket to the upcoming Harlem Globetrotters game, but for that you'd need to contact the Wembley Box Office.

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England v USSR (Match-Day Programme, 1984)

We're delighted to bring you our very first guest post courtesy of Rob Langham, a member of the team behind the brilliant blogsite The Two Unfortunates. Here, Rob takes us back 28 years to an international game he attended at Wembley and the match-day programme that accompanied it...

The programme for England’s international against the USSR, a match that took place on 2 June 1984, is a fascinating time capsule, not least due to the advertising strategies of the time - more of which later.

Unbeknownst to all of us at the time, the Soviet Union only had another seven years to run. Mikhail Gorbachev was still a year away from assuming office and our relationship with the USSR was filtered through the prism of the late Cold War period - tit for tat Olympic boycotts and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video for Two Tribes perhaps the most memorable manifestations of international relations.

That was a polyglot Soviet side. Having performed solidly at the 1982 World Cup in Spain, they, like England, had failed to reach that Summer’s European Championships in France. Far from Russian-dominated, the various republics of the union were well represented with captain Aleksandr Chivadze and Tengiz Sulakvelidze representing Georgia, Sergei Aleinikov and Sergei Stukachov hailing from Belarus and Kazakhstan respectively, and the Armenian Khoren Oganesyan acting as the XI’s primary creative force.

All of that was to be swept away two years later of course - as incoming manager Valeriy Lobanovskiy made a better fist of what Ron Greenwood had tried to do with Liverpool players for England the previous decade by jettisoning much of the existing squad (including Oganesyan - dropped for developing a ‘star complex’) and packing the team with the Ukrainians of Dynamo Kyiv.

But for now, it was an effective and unspectacular unit that cantered to a 2-0 victory against an England led by Bobby Robson.

In his programme notes, Robson opined about the lack of availability of players on a consistent basis and it was a weakened team that eventually took the field here - Mike Duxbury’s horrendous error allowing for the first goal and provoking a chorus of boos in a sparsely populated Wembley.

The old guard - Peter Shilton, Terry Butcher, Bryan Robson, Ray Wilkins and Trevor Francis was supplemented by a number of newcomers with perhaps the most significant being Gary Lineker - appearing in the squad for the first time in the 1-0 defeat to Wales that Spring.

But the number of unlikely names betrays a team in transition after the failure to overcome Denmark in European Championship qualifying. Former NASL man Steve Hunt, David Armstrong, Mike Hazard and John Gregory all made it to Bisham Abbey.

The most intriguing of the inclusions was winger Mark Chamberlain, Dad of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and a man who performed spiritedly on the afternoon - overshadowing the man on the opposite flank, John Barnes (the latter was to have the last laugh a few days later when he scored after a mazy run against Brazil).



There was also a Watford inflection to things - as reigning European under-21 Champions, Robson had seen fit to promote a number of that set up to the full team and Nigel Callaghan was one to benefit. Add to that Luther Blissett, at the time a Milan player but forged at Vicarage Road nonetheless.

But the theme didn’t end there. In a year that saw the Hertfordshire club reach an FA Cup Final, the programme advertised ‘The Summer of 84 Concert’ for later that month, with chairman Elton John headlining, supported by Nik Kershaw, Paul Young, Kool & The Gang and Wang Chung plus DJ appearances from Steve Wright and Simon Bates among others. Dull and dreary England’s 2-0 defeat may have been but presumably considerably less horrific than the entertainment offered by that shower.

Elsewhere in the publicity sections, the prospect of gridiron action involving the Tampa Bay Bandits and Philadelphia Stars was offered (no, I haven’t heard of them either) and a typically oblique Benson and Hedges adorned the back page - MIDDLE TAR.

Our thanks go to Rob for that wonderful trip down memory lane, and don't forget you can catch more of Rob's writing (together with that of many other fine folk) at www.thetwounfortunates.com. We also urge you to follow TheTwoUnfortunates on Twitter, too.

If you'd like to contribute an article of your own, please do so - simply contact @COakleyFtbl or @sofa_soccer on Twitter or leave us a comment on one of our blog posts and let us know all the details. Cheers!

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Steve Earl's Football Programmes

Since I first bought a copy of Shoot! for 42p (a price rise of 2 pence on the previous week’s issue I found out later...scandalous!), I have always been drawn to the adverts section near the back of football magazines. The promise of football-related goodies, often in full colour, tempting me all these years. 

Looking back on 25 years' worth of ads, it’s funny how some things have changed and others not. The ads aimed at kids have changed dramatically, moving with the times, as one would expect. Pastel shaded drawings of rosy faced children in England pyjamas (the ad was for football pyjamas, I'd like to point out) replaced with the headache inducing ‘LOOK AT MY AWESOME STUFF IT’S SO AWESOME AAAAAAAARGH!!!!!’ style adverts prevalent in today’s brain mush kids’ football rags.

Adverts aimed at the older end of the age spectrum have changed little; their sober, informative format giving the consumer just what they want – information about what the product is, what it does, how you can obtain it and, in the ‘olden’ days, the standard line about allowing 28 days for delivery.

One specific advert that never seems to have changed is the one that always caught my eye as a lad and still does now.  That of Steve Earl’s Football Programmes.

Advert from Shoot!, July 1986

 

When Saturday Comes, January 2012

The same goofy, child-bearing-hipped football fan – arm still raised aloft, still giving that curious thumbs up, possibly referring to the FREE programmes (NB: in these hard economic times, this is now just a free programme catalogue) the ad’s strapline has always carried and still clutching a handful of programmes. This figure has been invading my conscious mind for over 21 years and yet, despite this apparently excellent marketing device, the crucial piece of info missing from my memory when I came to research this was... who the hell is this advert for? For as much as I could remember the cartoon, that it was for football programmes and that it offered FREE programmes, I had no idea who was selling / giving them away.

In truth this is probably down to me not really being into football programmes, so I never felt the need to read past the first few lines. I did consider sending off for some free ones back in the day, the offer of free things by post having a very strong allure to a child whose only real post up until that point had been the limited edition Star Wars figures (send 3 names / proof of purchases from the backing cards).

Upon further research (reading my old copies of Shoot! after a trip to the garage), I discovered it was for the aforementioned Steve Earl.  I also discovered, to my disappointment and mild horror as it almost torpedoed the whole angle of this post, that in the copies of Shoot! from 1990, the advert had shrunk to only a few lines and more importantly, Mr GoofyProgrammeMan wasn’t there!!!  Rising costs and an imminent recession obviously took their toll and poor old GPM was laid off. It also now cost a whopping 50p, albeit in unused stamps, to obtain the desired free, sorry, FREE programmes. 

 

1990 - FREE Football Programmes still available, but no Goofy Programme Man?

Thankfully, despite worldwide economic meltdown, Steve seems to have fully embraced the value of solid branding and restored good ol' Goofy to his rightful place...just to the left of the title.

One more thing I love about this advert is that, through all the years, the font may have changed, GPM may have taken a sabbatical, colour may have arrived, but one thing that has remained constant is the address.  Broad Street, Bungay, Suffolk NR35 1AH.  I can just picture it now...actually, with Google Maps and street view I can do just that...so here it is...

The Promised Land!

Steve Earl's Football Programmes, I may never have sent off for your enticing offer, but you have been a steady rock in my turbulent life for two and a half decades and for that, I salute you!

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