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Fantasy Nostalgia: Shirt Sponsorship in the 1960s

February 18, 2015, 3:32 pm
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What would the football kits of English football teams have looked like if shirt sponsorship had arrived a decade earlier, during the late-1960's? Go on, admit it - you've been wondering about that, haven't you?

Well wonder know more as we conjure up some more fantasy illustrations to take you into an alternative reality where things really did happen...


We begin with Sheffield United (above left) who in this image are sporting the sponsor's name of Woodbine. Why? For no other reason than the once popular cigarette brand features in The Greasy Chip Butty Song, favoured so much by fans of The Blades. So there.

Then we have Watford (above centre) who perhaps might have had the Green Shield Stamps logo on their plain yellow shirts. I matched the logo with the team because the building that once acted as the Green Shield UK headquarters was based in Edgware, a short distance from the Vicarage Road ground.

Lastly, on the right of the image, I've paired up Manchester United with Watney's Red Barrel. Again, no complicated reason for this, other than the logo looks quite nice on a red shirt.

Onto the next selection...


Tottenham and Persil (above left) - a perfect combination, purely because we were always told that 'Persil washes whiter'... and just as well, as those white shirts can get really rather muddy sometimes...

Above centre is Aston Villa and their HP Sauce-fronted shirts. Here we have another local connection as the factory that used to make HP Sauce was located in Aston, Birmingham. (And you thought I was just throwing this stuff together...)

Lastly on the right, we have Oxo on the shirts of Nottingham Forest, proving once again that some logos just look better on a particular background colour. Oxo's packaging has been red for many years, so it just seems to fit.


And so to the last selection of 60's-sponsored kits, and we begin with the Hoover logo on the QPR shirt (above left). Anyone that's driven down the A40 Western Avenue in London has probably seen the lovely Art Deco building that once produced Hoover appliances at some point or another. The Hoover Building is situated just over five miles away from QPR's Loftus Road ground, thereby creating yet another tenuous link.

The middle kit is that of Norwich City, and their shirt is sponsored by Fairy Snow. The name might be faintly embarrassing, but there is a connection as packets of the erstwhile detergent used to have a yellow and green colour scheme. Fact.

Last, but not least, there's Everton and their Lyons Maid splash across the famous old blue shirt. Here I have to admit I really have been throwing this together as the weakest of all connections is based on Everton once having the great Mick Lyons on their team roster during the 1970s. Pathetic really, isn't it?

-- Chris Oakley
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Sitting Alongside - The Golden Age of Co-Commentary: Part 2

February 20, 2015, 11:45 pm
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Continuing our look at the great, the good and the trying-hard-not-to-be-embarrassing from the world of football co-commentary...

Charlton, Jack

The older of the Charlton brothers barely had a chance to put his feet up after retiring from an accomplished playing career when he was swiftly snapped up by ITV. His first assignment saw him fly out to Belgrade to cover the 1973 European Cup Final with Brian Moore, and he did the same again in 1974, 1976 and 1980. Six FA Cup Finals between 1974 and 1981, not to mention a wide range of England internationals culminating in the 1982 World Cup were also added to Big Jack's canon, proving an undoubted talent that his employers could regularly rely upon.

Jack Charlton's vocal style was distinctive but winningly efficient. Possessing a stronger Geordie accent than his younger brother, the viewer occasionally had cause to stop and figure out what it was he'd actually said (cf. "I dunna why he didn't hit it to the far purst"). That aside, Charlton rarely wasted a word as he described what was going on, nor in his views about a particular player, team or manager.

Forthright without being overtly controversial, Jack Charlton unquestionably found the right balance in his delivery. A player of considerable experience, he had plenty to say and wasn't afraid to say it, but he was always fair-minded in his assessment of everything. It would have been easy for him to bore people about his days playing for Leeds or England, or to gloat about the greatness he achieved, but he didn't. Instead, he spoke with conciseness and meaning, just as you always hope a co-commentator would.

Insight - 8.5/10 Speak-when-you're-spoken-to-ability - 9/10 Humour - 5.5/10 Controversialness - 6/10 Delivery - 8.5/10. OVERALL - 7.5/10.


Clough, Brian

Given Brian Clough's success with Derby County and his outspoken 'clown' comments about Poland's goalkeeper in 1973, it's strange that he wasn't handed a co-commentator's microphone until 1979. Perhaps it's because ITV preferred to make use of his presence as a studio-based panelist because that's where you'd have found him for much of the early- to mid-70's.

As it is, Clough toned down his controversial views once relocated alongside the main commentator, but he remained truthful and honest with the things that he said. When hearing Clough's analysis, you always got the feeling he was scrutinising every moment, processing everything that was going on in front of him in fine detail. Waffle was a rarity with Clough - what you got was an interesting take on the game with points being made that weren't immediately apparent to the casual viewer.

And he continued to do just that throughout the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, several domestic Cup Finals and European Finals to boot. By the late-1980's, however, his main career as manager of Nottingham Forest was entering its final stages and his work for ITV came full circle as he appeared more and more often in front of camera as a studio guest rather than behind the mike. As TV viewers, that worked out just fine as Clough got more of a chance to speak at greater length rather than keeping his utterances short and to the point.

With more time to talk, there was greater potential for hearing the sort of spiky dialogue he'd become known for, and that, after all, was what we all wanted deep down. Far from bland, Brian Clough liked to talk and knew how to make you listen whether you liked him or not.

Insight - 9/10 Speak-when-you're-spoken-to-ability - 8.5/10 Humour - 6.5/10 Controversialness - 7/10 Delivery - 8.5/10. OVERALL - 7.8/10.

Hill, Jimmy

If ever a man made it his job to watch football and explain it to the ordinary TV viewer, it was Jimmy Hill. Then again, Jimmy Hill made it his job to do many things in his life, from running football clubs to representing the interests of players as PFA Chairman.

On TV he could have conceivably done everything himself; presenting the programme, commentating on the match, conducting the interviews with the players afterwards and reviewing the key tactical sequences... Hill had so much experience, he could have done any or all of those things with consummate ease.

As it is, he was asked to take his seat in the commentary box and convey his thoughts whenever their was a big match taking place. Initially on ITV, Jimmy Hill formed a winning partnership with Brian Moore and was present for the FA Cup Finals from 1969 to 1973, as well as numerous England matches and European Finals. A switch to the BBC then saw him initially move to a front-of-camera roll hosting Match of the Day, but from the 1980's he was back behind the mike again for World Cups and European Championships alike.

His skill at reading the game and understanding who was playing well and who wasn't (including the officials) gave him a reputation for being one of the best football brains around. Unfortunately it also prompted some people to regard him as a know-it-all and would happily impersonate him as a dreary, self-satisfied bore.

This was unfair to say the very least. If any criticism could be aimed at Jimmy Hill, it's that he was perhaps on TV too frequently over a long period of time, but that wasn't his fault either. TV producers knew he could add much to a live match broadcast, so unsurprisingly they made use of his talents whenever possible. And why not... Jimmy Hill loved the game just as much (if not more) than anyone, and his desire to prove it during his co-commentaries was a very admirable trait indeed.

Insight - 8.5/10 Speak-when-you're-spoken-to-ability - 8/10 Humour - 5/10 Controversialness - 5/10 Delivery - 9/10. OVERALL - 7.1/10.

And now, once again, it's time to look at some of the minor members of the 'Sitting Alongside' club...

Clemence, Ray: Rarely used former Liverpool and Tottenham goalkeeper but a shrewd collaborator that spoke with sense and relevance. Joined Brian Moore for ITV's coverage of England's 8-0 win in Turkey in November 1984, but should have been used much more often.

Francis, Trevor: Britain's first million-pound player and in recent years a regular co-commentator on Sky Sports, but it all started back in 1986 when he accompanied Brian Moore during England's goalless friendly in Budapest. Great insight as an accomplished player and manager and pleasingly talked a lot of sense.

Greaves, Jimmy: One of the greatest England forwards of all time and a colourful co-presenter for ITV's 'Saint and Greavsie', yet not used all that often in the commentary box. Perfectly comfortable in front of the camera where his jovial character shone through in abundance, his appearances behind the mike were mainly confined to the 1990's. Possessing a potent mix of humour and honest criticism, Greaves was a fine foil to Brian Moore and was able to lighten the mood of a game better than most of his peers.

Coming up in Part 3:
A galloping manager, a Saint and a host of stars that disappeared as quickly as they'd arrived...

-- Chris Oakley
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Cadbury's Soccerbar (1973)

February 26, 2015, 2:48 pm
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First, there was chocolate...

Then there was football...

(Actually both came into being around the same time, especially where commercially produced chocolate is concerned, but that's to deviate from the thrilling introduction...)

...Then finally there was SOCCERBAR!

You haven't heard of it, have you?

Thought not. Soccerbar rode the first big wave of themed chocolate products that emerged in the late-1960's when companies like Cadbury and Nestlé (pronounced 'Nessul' in our house) looked for new ways to make us buy their choccies. Like we needed an excuse!

Aiming their sights squarely at the junior market, they produced a succession of fairly ordinary chocolate bars temptingly packaged with imagery from films and TV programmes. By the early-70s it was possible to buy your favourite cocoa-based comestibles in association with The Jungle Book, Noddy, Doctor Who and a host of others... and that was before turncoats like The Mr Men and The Wombles sold their souls later that same decade.


Yet it wasn't always a specific title that could tempt the average schoolboy to part with his pocket money. Sometimes a generic concept could work just as well, and what better than the exciting world of football? (Well pictures of naughty, bikini-clad women on a chocolate bar wrapper was always going to be litigious at the best of times...)

The year was 1973 and Cadbury decided it was the to bring the world of football to its chocolate-munching devotees, and Soccerbar was the result. There was, perhaps, a problem. Although some chocolate bars could be made in a shape loosely approximating a cartoon character, it wasn't so easy to replicate in fine detail the lank hair of Stan Bowles or the stocky ruggedness of Norman Hunter.


A different approach was needed and ultimately Cadbury decided to focus on the packaging, rather than the contents. Around each foil-wrapped bar was a brightly coloured sleeve; the front of it featured a hand-drawn action shot (sometimes deliberately referencing a proper league club like Crystal Palace) while the back contained Soccerbar's undoubted USP: knowledge.

As we all know, kids like nothing better than collecting a set of something, and here they could do so by collecting all 12 Soccerbar wrappers. Why? Because each one had tips and advice on how to improve your football skills and fitness.


Many a nugget of helpful instruction was provided. "Wingers... Practice crossing the ball by constantly aiming at a point above the penalty spot which would make for a good header" suggested one wrapper, while another told Centre Backs that "solid, accurate heading is vital".

Staying fit and avoiding injury was also discussed, telling the young consumer that warming up and doing exercises were vital in order to stay in peak condition. Quite how that would have gone down with the chocolate-scoffing juvenile one can only wonder, but the advice was valuable nonetheless.


It's not quite clear how long Soccerbars were around for, but we're guessing that England's failure to qualify for the 1974 World Cup may have spelled the end for anything football-related in Cadbury's growing range of products.

This was, nonetheless, a simple example of maximising sales by pandering to your potential customers. Kids love football, kids love chocolate, ergo you make a chocolate bar that appeals to young football fans. It worked like a charm and the bellies of millions of children were satisfyingly filled accordingly.

-- Chris Oakley
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Preview: Football Attic Podcast 22

March 2, 2015, 8:53 pm
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This Saturday, March 8th, we'll be recording Episode 22 of The Football Attic Podcast - and we'll be interviewing a very special guest, author Greg Lansdowne.

Greg's new book, 'Stuck On You: The Rise & Fall... & Rise of Panini Stickers', is a fascinating look at the heyday of football sticker collecting in the UK. Covering Merlin, FKS and many other manufacturers as well as Panini, it's the must-have book for anyone that's ever known the joy of swapping and sticking!

Ahead of the podcast recording, we're inviting you to send in your questions on sticker collecting. Whether it's a technical query about one of the Panini albums or you're just curious about which collection Greg likes the most, leave us a message below or email admin [at] thefootballattic [dot] com.

We'll do our very best to read out your questions as we indulge in our love for one of the most a-peeling pastimes ever! Thanks for your participation!

And you can order your own copy of 'Stuck on You' via Amazon UK for just £12.99 (paperback) and many other great retail outlets.
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Panini: Football 83

March 5, 2015, 7:12 pm
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In 1983, Panini did for football players what Morecambe & Wise did for Angela Rippon. Where before there was a tidal wave of heads and faces, now there were legs everywhere - hundreds of them adorning virtually every sticker on every page. This was a new approach: out went the head-shots of previous collections and in came full-length shots of every player in full team kit. Amazing.

It's difficult to know what people thought of this change back in the day. Speaking personally, I remember being a little confused but ultimately rather pleased with the sight of whole players, rather than just their heads and shoulders. Now we could see a complete team kit, and though we might have seen glimpses of it on TV, it was now possible to gaze eternally at the entire ensemble in all its detailed glory.

The shift to tall, thin stickers from the squarer, more squat shape was a seismic event in the history of Panini's UK domestic football collections. It's never been repeated (not to my knowledge, at least) and people still talk about it to this day. The obvious nod towards the old cigarette cards of the early-20th Century would have pleased the nostalgia lovers no end, but younger collectors may have missed the chance to see what a player looked like close up. As it is, they weren't missing much. Who wants to see sensible haircuts and dead-behind-the-eyes facial expressions in fine detail anyway?


The change in shape of the stickers could have posed one or two problems where the foil badges were concerned. Your average club crest tends not to be tall and slim by its very nature (Birmingham City's being one of the few exceptions), so how could you fill up all the empty space going spare? One idea was provided on the first page of the album with the shiny versions of the logos for the Football League and Professional Footballers' Associations in England and Scotland.


What Panini did for the team badges, however, was rotate them 90 degrees and add a cartoon illustration of the team's nickname. My 12-year-old self thought this was magnificent; an informal adjunct to the ruthlessly slick content found elsewhere in the album. More often than not, the cartoons were literal (Ipswich had pennants sporting the word 'Blues') while others were common knowledge to the regular football fan anyway. It was when I got to the Scottish teams that I struggled, though. My knowledge of football north of the border was considerably patchier, so why were Dundee United represented by a bunch of fans being noisy?

The illustrations, despite not having the nicknames provided, were good fun and very nicely drawn. In fact the whole presentation of the foil badges was very well done indeed, from the scarf-like team name banner to the inclusion of the year the club was formed.


But back to those player pictures. Despite Panini's usual meticulous efforts to get all the required photographs in a single shoot, their high standards were sometimes compromised by the players themselves - or specifically their attempts to dress appropriately.

The classic example of this was found on pages 38 and 39 of the Football 83 album where you'd find several of Swansea City's fine band of men devoid of any decent footwear. First there was Colin Irwin, captain of the side and a former Liverpool defender and yet, despite having been given a football to hold onto, didn't have any boots to wear. The same can be said of Bob Latchford, one-time Everton great yet now, at the ripe old age of 32, forced to pose for a picture with only socks on his feet.


Alan Curtis notched up the embarrassment levels even further by wearing a full kit and carpet slippers on his feet. Little is known about the Great Swansea Shoe Shortage of 1983, but this album will give historians a valuable insight into those austere times.

Over on the West Ham pages, Phil Parkes only just avoided humiliation of a similar nature by donning what appeared to be a pair of desert boot/football trainer hybrids, but even with the right footwear, other perils were abound. Take, for instance, the gentleman in the dark jacket and grey flannels walking accidentally into shot behind Birmingham City' Pat Van Den Hauwe. All very unfortunate...


At least Football 83 had its fair share of curiosities throughout. There was Arsenal in their first ever modern, shiny kit complete with Dennis the Menace socks; Dave Sexton wearing that rarest of things - a Coventry 'Talbot' tracksuit top; and a host of future Premier League managers from Martin Jol to Alan Curbishley all looking fresh-faced and free of the stress that was to blight their post-playing careers.


After the previous year's collection, Panini decided not to bother with a section on Division Three and stayed with the tried-and-trusted 'badge and team pic' format for the Division Two teams. As for the Scottish Premier Division teams, there were no full-length pictures for their players. Yet again, they were two to a sticker (head shots only), but as with the English First Division teams, there was room for an extra player on the page thanks to some skilful rejigging of the layout.


Finally, on the last seven pages of the album, we were treated to one of the more inventive and interesting features from Panini's rich canon. 'Laws of the Game' made great use of the longer-shaped stickers by giving us pictures explaining each of the laws of Football. Accompanied by full text descriptions of everything from the correct way players should be dressed to the offside rule, this was a genuinely useful and satisfying addition to the album - not least because of the 'Boys Own' style of illustration used on each of the pictures.


And that was that - a great end to a very good collection filled with new ideas that kept our love for Panini well and truly alive. But could it last, and what would the thousands of loyal Panini sticker collectors expect in 1984? All would soon be revealed...


-- Chris Oakley
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The Football Attic Podcast 22 - Panini Special

March 12, 2015, 2:11 am
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Football sticker enthusiasts: you have reached your aural Valhalla! The Football Attic is proud to present 80 minutes of discussion on the subject of sticker collecting featuring our very special guest, Greg Lansdowne.

Greg's currently promoting his new book, 'Stuck On You: The Rise & Fall... & Rise of Panini Stickers', which looks into the history of self-adhesive football stickers in the UK. Having spoken to the great and the good from Panini, Merlin and many other great names down the years, Greg has put pen to paper to document the fascinating story of how we all got hooked on the great collecting craze for football lovers young and old.

'Stuck on You' is on sale now, but if you haven't got your copy yet, never fear - The Football Attic managed to catch up with Greg recently to bring you a personal take on some of the fascinating stories you'll find in the book.

And if you sent in questions for Greg, you're in luck as our guest very kindly spent some time providing answers to all your Panini-related enquiries and disputes.

Belly dancers, newspaper moguls and striking TV broadcasters... You'll find out all about these, plus stickers, cards and much more besides on The Football Attic Podcast 22!

Subscribe to The Football Attic Podcast on iTunes or download our podcast here.


Stuck on You: The Rise & Fall - & Rise of Panini Stickers
By Greg Lansdowne
Pitch Publishing Ltd
256 pages
Paperback
Price: £12.99 (Amazon.co.uk)

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Field of Screens - Five Great Football Documentaries

March 17, 2015, 4:39 pm
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It's been a while since our last guest post, but we're delighted to welcome Dave Burin to The Football Attic who tells us about five excellent football documentaries - all available to watch via YouTube....

Football and film crews have always been uneasy bedfellows.  From Graham Taylor's England predictably crumbling under pressure in Do I Not like That, to the spectre of Thatcher-era hardship limiting Sheffield Wednesday's crowds, in 1984's Steel City Blues, the football documentary has often provided an insight into the fractious, emotionally-charged nature of the game. Away from the blandly glamorous veneer of 'Super Sunday' and inoffensive post-match interviews, football has always existed as something more earthy and complex... as the following five documentaries illustrate.

1. The Crazy Gang (BT Sport, 2014)



For younger fans, the reverence towards Wimbledon's FA Cup triumph of 1988 might seem rather confusing. Was this not a team whose name became synonymous with dull, route-one football? Were they not resented for their overly physical approach? Does this mean people actually like Dennis Wise? Yes. Yes. Hopefully not.

Wimbledon's FA Cup triumph - and to a lesser extent their eventful tenure in English football's top flight - are so celebrated because of the unlikeliness of their success. A ragtag band of lower-league stalwarts and juvenile misfits combined to catapult Wimbledon from a Southern League side to worthy winners of the world's most famous cup competition, in less than 11 years.

It's a genuine footballing fairytale, wonderfully relived through BT Sport's recent documentary The Crazy Gang. Weaving together rare archive footage from muddy, scrappy fixtures at Plough Lane to anecdotes like Dave Bassett's precise attitude to goalscoring ("If we didn't have 18 shots a game, then we had an inquest") and unflinching recollections of dressing-room bullying, it's a film which evokes both the charm and the cruelty of Wimbledon at their peak.

Comprehensive and unflinching, whilst remaining entertaining, The Crazy Gang is, just as the Wimbledon side were, not without its flaws. There's too much focus on Fashanu and Jones using the documentary as a platform for hard-man bragging, but overall, this is excellent football filmmaking. From Sam Hammam's tales of tough negotiations, to Lawrie Sanchez's wondrous Wembley memories - all of it sumptuously filmed - The Crazy Gang is well worth a watch, whether you're a Womble, or just wondering what the fuss is about.

2. Steel City Blues (BBC North, 1984)



1984 was a year of mixed blessings for the proud industrial city of Sheffield. Whilst the bitter feud of the Miners strikes took hold, amidst rising unemployment, United and Wednesday were thriving on the pitch. The Blades rose from the old Third Division through the infeasibly tight margin of goals scored, whilst the Owls returned to the top tier for the first time since 1970. This incisive documentary from BBC North examines the remarkable rise of Howard Wilkinson's Wednesday, amidst a backdrop of economic gloom, and an increasingly derelict city landscape.

As with The Crazy Gang, the interview sources are again a strength of this documentary. Steel City Blues includes interviews with a young David Blunkett (then leader of Sheffield City Council), several members of the Sheffield Wednesday squad - most notably Martin Hodge - supporters, and even an Owls fanatic who showcases his love of symbolism by collecting ceramic owls. The amount of football footage on show is - reflecting the times - fairly limited. However, close focus on a decisive promotion win against Crystal Palace, and the subsequent jubilant celebrations upon the terraces, provide a stark contrast to the scenes of industrial decline.

Steel City Blues is very much a document of its time, and feels all the more unbiased and authentic for it. Set to a strangely eclectic soundtrack, including Joe Cocker and dyslexic local lads Def Leppard, this remains one of the best and most concise documentaries about the way in which football offers an escape from the frustrations of everyday life. And in 1984, Sheffield Wednesday offered an exciting and uplifting glimpse of what football could bring to a struggling city.

3. Big Ron Manager (Sky TV, 2006)



Ronald Frederick Atkinson. He of the remarkable suntan and the entirely baffling phrase "early doors". Winner of two FA Cups and two League Cups as manager. Reduced to ruining Steve Bleasdale's burgeoning managerial career for the sake of TV ratings. As the Posh slipped down the table during the bizarre experiment that was Big Ron Manager, the only real winners were the viewers of this unique and strange documentary. It was, if nothing else, a success of sheer entertainment.

Jeff Stelling narrates the show, taking time out from his usual role of impressing* (*scaring) viewers with an intimate knowledge of Stirling Albion's goalscoring woes and Exeter City's loanee midfielders. Opening the first episode, Stelling asks "will Big Ron being able to work his magic in this down-at-heel football world?" The answer is a resounding NO. Mostly, he interferes in Bleasdale's perfectly competent running of the team, reels off 'Ronglish' platitudes to a confused dressing room and turns up at Barry Fry's gaff for lasagne. It's gripping TV, in its weird, slightly mundane glory.

The show's true gems, though, are a result of its behind-the-scenes access. Genial defender Mark Arber gets in hot* (*warm?) water as a result of tampering with a urine sample. Posh's youngsters misunderstand the contrasts of visiting a local factory as an excuse to act stupidly, and Bleasdale finishes a rousing team talk by telling the players "and the word I'm looking for, before the finish, is 'sloppy mode.'" 'Magic darts' and all that.

Big Ron Manager remains an interesting look at a footballing level and era where the gates are low, the ground is crumbling, and the measured old heads clash with brash young talents. It all happens at London Road, but in truth this could have been any contemporary lower league side. And it remains a fascinating watch for fans of any team.

4. City! A Club in Crisis (Granada, 1981)



Malcolm Allison's outspoken, frank manner means he's always been renowned as a footballing showman, as much as he has a managerial success. "There aren't many players who can do that", a City boardroom member tells Allison, after Kenny Dalglish scores a dipping strike against the Maine Road men. "What?  Make the ball bounce?" replies the acerbic, flamboyant boss. But, in a no-holds-barred piece of football filmmaking which turns many preconceptions on its head, Allison's increasing vulnerability is one of City!'s most fascinating facets.

As with Big Ron Manager, the behind-the-scenes access of this documentary gives it an authentic and refreshingly honest feel. After one defeat, the players congregate in the dressing room to analyse the fixture. This begins with a cry of "what about that fuckin' referee?", followed by noises of outraged agreement.  It's a world away from the lazy platitudes of glum midfielders with a microphone unwittingly shoved in their face by Geoff Shreeves.

It also shines a light on areas rarely seen by fans. The City team are seen training on the fields by Manchester's Platt Lane. John Bond's job interview is caught on camera. An incredulous narrator tells us how Allison likes any "new idea", trying "dancing teachers, psychiatrists, university lecturers and, now, he's planning music in the dressing room". It's a fascinating portent of what would become the revered footballing field of 'Sports Psychology'.

The most fascinating area of this production, though, is the battle between the aging master, Malcolm Allison, and his managerial replacement and childhood friend, John Bond. It's a narrative which Shakespeare would have been proud of, but the drama of it is low-key and emotional. When City meet Allison's new side, Crystal Palace, a seemingly desperate, shaken Allison faces the camera, and says, "I need to win badly. I need to win". He doesn't. It's the sign of a proud man having a genuine crisis, and as with everything in City! A Club in Crisis, there's that sense of intimacy and access which makes this a remarkable and engrossing gem of documentary making.

5. Football's Greatest Teams - Bayern Munich (Sky Sports, 2013)



Narrated by Hugh McIlvanney, whose voice sounds like a big bear hug, Football's Greatest Teams is one of Sky Sport's fleeting - but wonderfully produced - acknowledgements of football's existence prior to 1992.  Focusing on the Bayern team of the mid-1970s, which won three consecutive European Cups (bolded, because that's just ridiculous!), this superb piece focuses on game footage, but incorporates numerous player interviews - and perhaps most incredibly, fans' footage of the trip to Brussels for the 1974 European Cup Final at Heysel - Bayern's first ever appearance in the final.

As with the other entries here, there are some superb pieces of insight. Not least Bayern legend Rainer Zobel's slightly guilty recollection of that infamous European Cup tie against Leeds United.  "It was a goal" he admits. "It wasn't offside". It's not going to mean much to those at Elland Road, but it's a humble admittance which seems to rest uneasily with the brash, no-nonsense confidence of many of Bayern's stars of the period.

The footage, though, is probably the highlight here - especially for lovers of continental football. The rare, fuzzy footage of Gerd Müller smashing home goals from inside the box is enough to warm the heart, especially combined with McIlvanney's superb narration. It's a fitting tribute to a wonderful team.

Thanks to Dave Burin for his wonderful guest post. Seen any great football documentaries? Tell us about them! Drop us a line or do as Dave did - write us a guest post! We look forward to hearing from you...
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Golden Goals (1972)

April 1, 2015, 4:05 pm
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When I was a kid in the early 1980s, a trip to the local petrol station in my Dad's car didn't provide much in the way of excitement for me. Having filled up the tank and handed over his money in the forecourt shop, he'd return to the car with nothing more than a bunch of tokens for a free whisky tumbler and very little else. Had we been doing the exact same thing in the late 1970's, I might have been handed a small plastic Smurf as a special treat, or at the beginning of the Seventies, even an Esso World Cup Coin.

It seems I largely missed out on the petrol/football tie-ins that were so prominent in the early-70's. Everyone always thinks of Esso as being the masters of marketing where that's concerned (and rightly so), yet one little-known company had a go at cashing in on football fervour too - and made a decent job of it.

I say 'little-known company' - in fact it was a regional petrol company that was owned by Esso, not that anyone was really aware of that at the time. Cleveland Petrol had started out in the 1930's selling ethanol fuel in the north-east of England, but just before their forecourts were fully rebranded to Esso, they had the chance to embark on one or two football-related trade campaigns.

Golden Goals just happened to be a tie-in of sorts with ITV's The Big Match and it followed a familiar format. In the traditional manner, customers spending £1 on petrol at Cleveland stations were offered a free gift; in this case, a packet containing a solitary sticker. It doesn't sound like much, but the sticker was quite large and often split into two or three separate smaller images. Those images could then be stuck into an accompanying album (price: 20p) which doubled up nicely as a hardback reference book for the discerning young football fan.

If you lived in London or the South East back in 1972, you'd know that Golden Goals was The Big Match's answer to Match of the Day's'Goal of the Month' competition on the BBC. Luckily for fans of 'Shoot' (the ITV football show in the north-east of England), they got to see The Big Match often during the 1971-72 season. That's because the Tyne Tees cameras were often sent away to cover horse racing at Redcar or Newcastle, so to fill in, they'd broadcast The Big Match instead.


The Golden Goals book was 'compiled by Jimmy Hill and Brian Moore', and following a brief foreword by The Bearded One, there were regular references to the Big Match goalfest throughout. More than 70 pages of illustrations were provided, showing how various important goals were scored and the players that were involved in scoring them. Coupled with the words of Martin Tyler, those aforementioned stickers completed many of the pages, showing the interplay between players, their positioning on the pitch and the importance of the match itself - three things that Jimmy Hill was always excellent at explaining on TV.



The 1966 World Cup Final and the following tournament in 1970 were, as you'd expect, still fresh in the memory when the book was created, but they were by no means the be-all-and-end-all of this interesting compendium. A wide range of subjects - and great goals - were explored and explained in full colour and fine detail, from FA Cup giant killing to the great strikers of the 20th Century.


Specific teams were also given special treatment. Manchester United's 'goal power' looked at the awesome strike partnership of Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and George Best, while Arsenal's route to double-winning glory was also brought into sharp focus. There was even room to look at local rivalries within British football and the great teams of international football - neither of which had anything directly to do with great goals, but were beautifully illustrated all the same.


The concept of Golden Goals as a book along with its accompanying stickers was beautifully executed in a very subtle way. Whereas Panini and their ilk introduced the concept of albums containing many hundreds of stickers in a single collection, Cleveland's version had only 41, yet there's never a feeling of 'if only there were more' about it. The stickers are not intrinsically vital to the book because the book is a fine piece of work in its own right. And yet although the stickers only played a complementary role, you still got that feeling of joy when your Dad handed you a pastel blue packet at a Cleveland Petrol station, and you still had the pleasure of sticking your stickers into the book, thereby making it even better than it was.


This 'less is more' approach showed how Panini might have developed their collections in later years, and may even have avoided their demise of the early 1990's had they done so. By producing a hardback book packed with lots of information and far fewer stickers, Cleveland showed cleverness in creating something more substantial than a basic sticker album yet still had the allure of building a collection within it.


And while everyone was waiting for the video recorder to be invented, what better way to remember great goals than to study them in illustrated form, page by page? This book had them by the dozen and celebrated them with real flare and integrity. Oh, and the petrol came in quite handy too.

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Preview: Football Attic Podcast 23

April 9, 2015, 12:47 pm
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Greetings Podcast lovers and Attic dwellers!

Here's a quick message to let you know we're recording Podcast 23 in a couple of days' time, and this one has the simple working title of 'Best and Worst'.

Why? It's simple! During the course of the show, we're going to be throwing football nostalgia categories at each other (conversationally speaking) and discussing which are our favourite and least favourite things in those categories.

So for instance, you may hear Chris asking Rich for his best and worst items in the category of 'Football Kits'. Rich will obviously pick 'England '82' as his best and 'Coventry City 87' as his worst... Wait a minute... That can't be right... :-)

If all this still makes sense, we'd like to invite you to suggest some categories of your own. They can be as wide-ranging or as obscure as you like, as long as they have a football nostalgia element to them. (Don't make them too obscure, mind you - we're not that well-informed on Peruvian Second Division goalkeepers!)

Once you've done that, leave us a comment on the end of this post and we'll do our best to read out your suggestions during the recording. Simple!

Thanks very much as ever for your contributions. We look forward to hearing from you!


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The World At Their Feet - Official Film of the 1970 World Cup

April 9, 2015, 7:11 pm
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It’s a little known fact that several decades ago, the United Nations passed a resolution whereby ‘all references to the 1970 World Cup must mention the 1966 World Cup at some point.’ Applying only to British journalists, publishers and film-makers, this ensured that England’s finest hour was not easily forgotten and was exploited for all its nationalistic hubris until the inevitable fall from grace followed swiftly thereafter.

The evidence of this UN resolution that I may have just made up can be seen everywhere in the memorabilia of the early-1970’s. Even the Golden Goals book I wrote about recently couldn’t help but remind England fans that ‘hey - we won the World Cup in 1966… remember?’

The Official Film of the 1970 World Cup does exactly that, right from the very start when Bobby Moore is seen raising the Jules Rimet Trophy to a Union Flag-waving Wembley crowd. They had to, you see. The UN said so, and that was that.

With the ‘66’ box ticked, it was straight onto the next item on the Official World Cup Film Checklist, namely ‘Teams setting off/arriving’. Here we see the 1970 England squad boarding their plane while Patrick Allen set the scene verbally for us. Our narrator, who would later gain notoriety as the voice of the UK government’s ‘Protect and Survive’ films and, consequently, Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’ video was the ideal choice to describe the visuals of the film. With a voice that resonated with integrity and trust, you knew that this wasn’t going to be some cheap epic knocked off by someone still learning to use a cine camera. This was a serious film about the World Cup, and Patrick Allen’s narration added all the dynamic urgency that was needed to make it great.

After the fabulous signature tune, ‘Mucho Mexico Seven-O’, and the dubiously-depicted flags of the title sequence, there’s no option but to screw up our Official World Cup Film Checklist because for the first time ever there’s a story to be told. That’s right - not only were we treated to the sight of the world’s greatest football players kicking a ball around a pitch, but also some people acting. You know - pretending stuff was real and that.

The story of The World At Their Feet centres on a young Mexican boy called Martin who dreams of seeing the likes of Bobby Moore, Pele and Franz Beckenbauer playing at the Azteca Stadium. So intense is his love of football that he decides to hitchhike his way to the opening game without telling his mother. “Mama - she wouldn’t let me. She wouldn’t understand… but if she didn’t know…” says the boy (or at least that of the voiceover artiste representing him).

And so we see Martin on the back of a pack mule, getting out of a Coke truck, dangling his feet off the end of a paddle boat and sitting in the back of a glamorous couple’s convertible as it cruised along the Mexican highway. His passage to the Azteca seamless and uncomplicated, this small boy of no more than eight years soon finds himself rubbing shoulders with the public masses arriving in Mexico City for the start of the tournament. Such cleverness at masterminding a plan so fraught with peril at every stage could only be applauded if it wasn’t such a load of old codswallop.

Inside the stadium, the opening ceremony begins and the flags of the competing nations are paraded to a vociferous crowd. We see balloons released and the teams of Mexico and the Soviet Union taking to the field for the first game. As we’ve all come to expect by now, the screen is emblazoned with searing sunshine-drenched hues that make you feel hot just watching it. Heaven knows what it must have been like playing in that kind of heat, and the fact that the opening match ended 0-0 is probably no surprise to anyone.

After that, highlights from several games rattle through at a snappy pace. Israel v Uruguay, England v Romania, Bulgaria v Peru… all treated with the same mix of camera angles, neat editing and informative narration. There’s also the attraction (if ‘attraction’ be the word I’m looking for) of hearing the occasional orchestral sting or percussive refrain whenever a player takes a tumble or thumps the ground with his fist in frustration. Such informal elements perfectly date the film, but you can’t help but feel that they’d have been better suited to a Norman Wisdom movie.

On with the relentless parade of match highlights. Brazil’s first game against Czechoslovakia is backed by an upbeat samba tune while West Germany’s opener against Morocco has a marching band playing an accompaniment. So much for predictable stereotypes… There’s also the occasional sight of a match scoreboard to present half-time and full-time scores, plus another old favourite from World Cup films - the  crowd sequence.

It seems to me that several decades ago, football crowds had much more character to them. Instead of replica shirt-wearing oafs shouting abuse at the referee, you had women with beehive hair-dos applying lipstick to their mothers or men wearing pork-pie hats smoking pipes. Where are they now, one asks oneself?

One sequence that lingers long in the memory is the one featuring Sweden’s game against Israel. Picked out for its litany of fouls and general bad behaviour on the part of the players, we’re left not with a feeling of negativity being glorified so much as the pathetic futility that some of the players employ. Rash tackling, kicking off the ball and general impetulance are all on show here, and there’s even an attempt by Patrick Allen at gentle humour: “The Swedes, who have abolished capital punishment at home, seem to want to make an exception for [Israel’s] Spiegler. Probably wish they had, because three minutes later, Spiegler scores the equaliser for Israel.”

Before the last game in Group 1 between Mexico and Belgium, there’s a return to the story mentioned at the beginning. (You’d forgotten, hadn’t you?)  Martin’s Mum, watching the game on TV , spots her boy following the teams out onto the pitch at the Azteca Stadium as the official mascot. “Oh Martin” she says, “That’s where you are.” You’d perhaps expect her to break down in tears at the thought of seeing her only son for the first time in a fortnight, but she doesn’t. You might also expect her to be speaking to the police or social services after ‘mislaying’ her little boy, but she isn’t. She’s sitting in her rocking chair at home, baby in her arms, and she couldn’t care less. And you wonder why this film didn’t get an Oscar…

Mexico’s 1-0 win in their final game was enough to see them through to the quarter finals, thereby prompting a short piece of film showing Mexican fans celebrating in the centre of Mexico City. After that, there’s a summary of the quarter final line-up using barely-legible cardboard name tags, then it’s back to the action which, as ever, combines pitch-level camera angles with the more familiar top-down view. It’s what the official World Cup films do best, and why they’re always so engaging to watch.

As the goals fly in with increasing regularity, the semi finals are quickly upon us and special attention is given to the second match between Italy and West Germany. Concise, yet balanced, we’re allowed to enjoy the excitement of Schnellinger’s last minute equaliser to force extra time, the Italians’ distress at being robbed of a place in the Final and the flood of goals that arrived in the additional 30 minutes of play. With Beckenbauer’s right arm strapped up after a heavy fall, it was Italy who took advantage and went on to win 4-3 - a classic game, nicely presented in distilled form for the purpose of the film.

And so to the Final, but first, what happened to Martin?  Why, that cheeky little scamp managed to sneak onto the pitch at the Azteca while the stadium was empty for a quick kick-around. Sadly for him, his mother arrives (finally) to drag him off home by the ear, never to be seen again… or so we’re led to think.

Luckily, all the pomp and hoopla of the match between Brazil and Italy is on hand to take our mind of the young boy’s prospects. But wait! Who should be taking their seats in the crowd but a formally-dressed Martin with his mum (who appears to have made a rapid reversal in her treatment of his behaviour), plus the couple that gave him a lift in their convertible earlier in the film! It’s smiles all the way as the boy enjoys a happy ending before the inevitable screaming and shouting that occurs after the match when all the adults have a violent fist-fight. Probably.

Brazil and Italy, fortunately, have nothing but entertainment on their minds as they take to the field for The Greatest Final Ever ®. Again, there’s no intent to speed through the action - every aspect of all the key moments is explored in great detail. Slow motion, rythmic samba music, close-up shots of the enthralled crowd… they all add to the thrilling finale. There’s even time for some dubious dialogue from Patrick Allen after Italy level the score at 1-1: “Felix [Brazil’s goalkeeper], trying to wipe away the taste of Italy’s equaliser. Italy feasts on it. The Brazilian crowd have indigestion.” Even Joss Ackland would have trouble matching that during the 1974 World Cup Film…

And then after a tense second half, Brazil finally make the breakthrough and a 4-1 victory is assured. What’s more interesting than the sight of five goals being scored during the 90 minutes, however, is the chaos that ensues on the pitch afterwards. As the final whistle is blown, a thousand people spill onto the field to play their part in the celebrations.

We see from a first-person perspective fans trying to grab any available piece of clothing from the Brazilian players, referee Rudi Glöckner trying to leave the scene without being physically assaulted and an army of photographers, journalists and reporters all keen to relate the glory of this sensational Brazil victory as best they can.

In the middle of it all, Rivelino receives treatment from an injury, surrounded by the baying mob, Felix and Tostao embracing in tears at the sheer emotion of what’s happened and Pele, carried shoulder high by the fans that confirm his rise to sainthood in their eyes. All this captured on film by the cameramen that made themselves part of this impassioned scene. It’s a fabulous ending to a very enjoyable account of the 1970 World Cup.

And Martin? Leaving the stadium with his mother after the Final, he turns to her and says: “Mama - how far is it to Munich?”  Call me cynical, but I think she may have told him in no uncertain terms.

-- Chris Oakley

(PS - Since when did the Belgium flag have green on it?)
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The Football Attic Podcast 23 - Best & Worst

April 13, 2015, 4:46 am
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Hi folks! It's podcast time again!

So which exciting subject are we covering this time? We're not...nope! Rather than talk endlessly about one subject we decided to have fund and do a 'Best & Worst' list type thing, seeing as that's what the interweb seems to like these days.

During the course of the show, we throw football nostalgia categories at each other (conversationally speaking) and discuss which are our favourite and least favourite things in those categories.

So for instance, you may hear Chris asking Rich for his best and worst items in the category of 'Football Kits'. Rich will obviously pick 'England '82' as his best and 'Coventry City 87' as his worst... Wait a minute... That can't be right... :-)

It's all entirely our opinion and therefore totally subjective, just the way it should be!

ENJOY MOFOS!!!!

Subscribe to The Football Attic Podcast on iTunes or download our podcast here.

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Worst. Penalty. Ever.

April 14, 2015, 3:05 am
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No-one ever said it was impossible not to score from the penalty spot, but at the very least you shouldn't be far off if you miss. The penalty spot, after all, is only 11 metres away (give or take a few centimetres), and the goalmouth itself covers just short of 18 square metres. Having your shot saved by the goalkeeper is entirely possible, but missing the goal by a considerable distance? Well that's got to be virtually impossible, wouldn't you say?

Not if you're Diana Ross, it isn't, but surely the one-time lead singer of The Supremes has had a rough deal for the last 21 years? When she fluffed her big moment during the 1994 World Cup opening ceremony, she may have caused a collective sniggering up the sleeve of the watching millions around the world, but it wasn't her fault really. Prior to her unfortunate swing and miss while singing 'I'm Coming Out', she'd probably never even clapped eyes on a football, let alone be paid to kick one on a professional basis. Why on Earth did anyone expect her to put the ball in the back of that shoddily-made net?

Footballers, however, are different. They're very existence revolves around the ability to kick a ball straight, and, in a penalty situation, towards a largely open goalmouth.

With that in mind, we're inclined to scratch our heads until they bleed at the sight of this anti-skill on the part of Francis Lee in England's last international match of the 1960's...



And now let's recap to see just how bad that penalty was:


Yep. As we thought. Awful.


-- Chris Oakley
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Saint & Greavsie's DVD Football Quiz, 2006

April 15, 2015, 3:08 pm
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What lucky people we are! As you probably know by now, we love bringing you guest posts written by fabulous writers, and here's another one penned by top blogger Rich Nelson!

Rich recently came up with the answer to the question: "Whatever happened to Saint & Greavise?" (whether you were asking it or not), and here he is to tell all...

As part of the buzz around last summer's World Cup, my local charity shops got involved and I was sucked in. The Heart Foundation shop were offering various football-related fare, so I parted with 199 pence for a box of childhood memories featuring TV stalwarts Ian St John and Jimmy Greaves acting as quizmasters. Perhaps fortunately, my wife, who was unaware of Saint and Greavsie as she had grown up in Finland, placed the box in the garage, before I could get around to watching it, in DVD board game heaven with a Jack Bauer-themed quiz and one about James Bond.

So eventually on a period of gardening leave between jobs, I found myself tidying said garage and deciding to give it a whirl. Well, after kicking the free gift football to the dog...

It didn't take long for the wave of nostalgia to rush over me like heroin. The opening credits roll with cigarette cards coming to life to the soundtrack of the ITV World Cup 86 theme. Greavsie drinking milk (for a change), some clips from Wembley games of the era and then we're away. Now I may have had my mind spoiled by the Skinner and Baddiel imitations of Saint and Greavsie, with the constant chuckling... But I was almost disappointed for St John to pile straight into the introductions.

The main menu screens fart out a choice of two sides - England or Scotland... It's as though the quiz itself is set in the 1970s. It's a game for one or two players (or teams), including the patronising option of playing with a cat. I opted to play against the dog. Thankfully for me he slept through the whole ordeal. Choosing England or Scotland makes little difference to the game itself, aside from the pre-recorded joshing between Saint and Greavsie during the rounds.



It's a very typical TV quiz once it gets going, following the formula quite closely of A Question Of Sport. For someone who grew up on the sparse fare of televised football in the 1980s, it was nice to watch the footage that formed the "What happened next" rounds, followed by, in the first case, a clip of Steve Bull scoring for England with some questions about Bully's career. I didn't realise he'd scored four times... I suppose those days passed me by.

Part of the drawback to a DVD quiz were the questions which displayed a league table, where you had to identify the year. You then click to reveal the answer, before confirming whether you got it right. If you're playing on your own, would you be honest enough? I'd never cheat against the dog, I couldn't forgive myself. Luckily, the painful memories at the end of the 1998/99 season remained.

That's pretty much it - quiz over, roll credits.

But if you float around long enough, you'll find a couple of Easter Eggs on the main menu - bloopers and memories feature heavily, but one of them contains the pair's efforts at creating an all-time World XI. There is some evidence of a wider view outside of the British Isles, although surprisingly it is Greaves, perhaps, with the benefit of playing abroad, who is more willing to look to players like Lev Yashin, Di Stefano and Puskas. The XI itself is certainly different from a lot of similar efforts. Can't imagine Ray Wilson featuring heavily.



And so that's it - I'm happy to send my copy to anyone who wants it, it'd certainly pass the time after a night on the pop. You may need a few beers to help get through it. Hit me up on Twitter - first come first served.

Such generosity - thanks Rich! So there you have it... if you want to play along with Saint & Greavsie, get in touch with Rich Nelson on Twitter (@EscapeToSuomi) and you could soon be receiving his very own copy of the game.

It also just leaves us to say a big thank you to Rich for writing us this guest post, and if you want to read more of his excellent writing, you can catch him over at the Escape To Suomi website at www.escapetosuomi.com.
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Collectables in 1991-92

April 26, 2015, 12:11 am
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If you've recently read Greg Lansdowne's excellent book 'Stuck On You: The Rise & Fall… & Rise Of Panini Stickers', you'll know how much detail he managed to cram into 256 pages about the wonderful world of sticker collecting.

Now, especially for Football Attic followers, Greg takes a closer look at a pivotal time in the UK's sticker and card collecting market - the 1991-92 season...

Collectables will eat themselves

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

On reflection it was just the worst.

If you were a fan of football collectables, the Eighties splits opinion. Reading Rob Jovanovic’s book on the subject, ‘Swap Yer’ one would think it was a period in the doldrums.

Perhaps it is just that Rob is a ‘cards’ rather than ‘stickers’ kind of guy, but calling that decade a “barren time” and “dark days” for collectors are assertions that, in part, led me to write a book espousing the virtues of Panini, and stickers of that decade in general.

What followed in the early Nineties is a bit less equivocal.

It was a mess.

For those who had longed for the return of the football card there was a beacon of hope in the shape of Pro Set, yet its bright opening was quickly extinguished – partly by its own hand.

For sticker fans – or, specifically Panini sticker fans - it was the end of an era, encapsulated by the ‘Football 92’ (sic) album.

In fact the 1991-92 collectables season marked such a low point that it merits an unexpurgated retrospective.

It could be argued that having the opportunity to deal in four separate issues (six if you were able to get hold of two dedicated-Scottish versions on top) would be manna from heaven for those of a collecting disposition.

In reality, what was on offer was a dog’s dinner of a Panini sticker album plus three – three! - card collections.  

During the previous season, Panini had at least attempted to innovate (albeit badly) in an effort to counter the competition (new entrant Pro Set and the Sun’s ‘Soccer Sticker Collection’).
‘Football 1991’ begat not one but two different packets of stickers.

The red set, called the 'Foil Collection', was for club shinies, managers and Italia 90 World Cup action, coming out early in the season to lengthen the album’s presence. The 'Players Collection', in yellow, were the tried and tested individual head and shoulder pictures and team photo stickers, arriving in the familiar January Panini window.

Panini’s experiment was a failure – Pro Set was the collectable du jour for 1990-91 – but at least they tried.
By 1991-92 the album was remodelled to ‘English Football 1992’. It would be hard to find an album less Panini-like in composition.

Here is the crime sheet:

  • No Scottish stickers
  • Standardised head and shoulder shots had been replaced by action photos
  • Lower division football reduced to ‘Twelve of the Best from the Second Division’
  • No player biographies 
  • No foils/shinies!
Of course, there were mitigating circumstances.

Panini UK (along with other regions) had seen their budget severely cut – and, indeed, their resources dipped into in an attempt to manage leaks in other areas of owner Robert Maxwell’s empire -  and that was reflected in the resultant ‘English Football 1992’.

It was during this season that Panini lost the most controversial leader in their history – drowned at sea. Recovery in the UK – certainly in football terms – would take a number of years as Merlin became the prime mover. But that is another story.

If English collectors felt short-changed by Panini’s offering, at least those north of the border could feel like a wrong of the previous decade had been partially avenged. For many years, Scottish players were reduced to two players per sticker in Panini albums – a slight felt strongly by many.

Now, however, in ‘Panini Scottish Football 1992’, the Scottish Premier Division clubs were afforded a distinction not provided to their English counterparts that season.

They each had a shiny club badge.

With only 12 teams in the Scottish Premier Division, the album was padded out to the lofty heights of 180 stickers (compared to a still-paltry 276 for the English edition) with a section on Scottish players in England.

If Panini really were keen on cutting costs that year, why not produce the same stickers for players such as Chelsea’s Steve Clarke, who featured in both albums. Especially when the shot chosen for ‘English Football 1992’ is more of a crowd scene than a tribute to the now Reading boss.


But for all Panini’s sticker efforts, 1991-92 will go down in football collecting history as the year of the card.

American company Pro Set had capitalised on the over-egging of sticker albums over previous years with an innovative (for this generation of collectors) card set. Having made a successful entry into the lucrative US trading card market in the late Eighties, owner Ludwell Denny’s expansion plans showed early promise as it shifted around 20 million packets of the ‘Pro Set 1990-91 Collector Cards’ series.

With the help of football agent John Smith, Pro Set became the official card of the Football Association as it made a surprising, and successful, move into the UK.

That success was short-lived down to two factors.

Firstly, two rival card sets – Panini’s ‘Official Players Collection’ and ‘Shooting Stars’ – muddied the waters the following season.

Secondly, if the competition didn’t get them, Pro Set did a good job in bewildering collectors by issuing their 1991-92 edition in three different packets (Official Fixture Cards, followed by Player Cards in two parts). Like Panini’s sticker collection, they also chose to issue separately in Scotland.


Confusion reigned.

Each company pinned their colours to the masts of various football publications as they attempted to shout loudest amongst the cacophony of competing voices: Pro Set collaborated with Shoot! and The Sun, Shooting Stars with the newcomer 90 Minutes, while Panini worked with Match Weekly, Roy of the Rovers and the Daily Record in Scotland.

Similarly-proportioned cards had been hugely popular throughout the Sixties and Seventies as A&BC (subsequently taken over by Topps in the mid-Seventies) produced a series of memorable releases.

But whereas those sets were almost exclusively head and shoulder pictures, the latest collections (particularly Panini and Shooting Stars) were a hotch-potch of portrait and landscape action shots where the player represented would often be vying for attention with one or more opponents and/or or team-mates.

With Pro Set already seemingly an established brand – despite just one previous season – the new kid on the block was Shooting Stars. American-based billionairess Patricia Kluge set up Super League Publishing after her son had shown an interest in British football collectables. While Pro Set gave away 10 cards per pack, Shooting Stars went for 15 – a fair chunk of a 400-set.

With no experience in the industry, Kluge called upon the services of Merlin Publishing to distribute and market the collection. Founded by four former Panini employees/distributors, Merlin had already dipped its toe into the murky football waters, but ‘Team 90’ and their Italia 90 sticker albums had limited success. As a result they had decided to give football a wide berth while the volatile market settled down. To that end they were happy to assist Kluge without putting their name to the product.

As they had advised her, Shooting Stars proved to be a flop – as did every sticker and card collection that year - but it all ended happily ever after.


Kluge ended up taking a sizeable stake in Merlin, as well as introducing them to then Arsenal Vice-Chairman David Dein - who just so happened to be looking for a company to produce a sticker album for the recently-founded Premier League, with which he was also involved.

The rest is history.

While the 1991-92 collectables season had no winners, it did ‘turn out nice again’ for Kluge and her Merlin collaborators as well as, in the long-run, Panini. Even Pro Set had already ensured its place in collectables history for bringing about the revival of football cards in the UK… a legacy that lives on through Match Attax.  

Nick Berry had summed it up perfectly just a few years earlier… Every Loser Wins.

-- Greg Lansdowne

Our grateful thanks go to Greg Lansdowne for his excellent guest post, and a reminder to everyone that his fabulous book, ‘Stuck On You: The Rise & Fall… & Rise Of Panini Stickers’, is on sale now via Amazon UK and all good book shops.
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Fantasy Nostalgia: Fantasy League 1971/72

April 28, 2015, 3:35 am
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Well, there may only be a few weeks of the 1971/72 Football League season left, but we're quietly confident that our Fantasy League team's going to romp home to victory.

Oh alright then - here's who we've picked... It won't do any harm to tell you now...


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The Football Attic's Hit Parade: Glory Glory Leeds United

May 1, 2015, 4:28 pm
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And before you ask, that apostrophe in the title was put there to prevent all kinds of misinterpretation, for this is a new series looking at the world of football and its variable attempts to create music that sells in vast quantities.

Oh for sure we had 'Three Lions'. We even had 'World In Motion'. But what about those songs that barely grazed the lower echelons of the Top 40, or those stamped 'Rejected' by the producers of Top of the Pops?

Here at The Football Attic, we consider it our duty to remember all football songs, acknowledging their merits and failings with the sort of impartiality that an Eastern European voting in the Eurovision Song Contest can only dream of.

And so we begin with Glory Glory Leeds United, a song that was released in 1968 after Leeds won the 1968 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup and League Cup, although some argue it was unleashed on an unsuspecting public prior to their appearance in the 1970 FA Cup Final.



Either way, it treads the well-trodden path that is 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic', a song that uses the music from 'John Brown's Body' and containing the familiar chorus 'Glory, Glory, Hallelujah'. Inherently catchy, it formed the basis for many other football team songs down the years, not to mention one particularly notorious offering by The Goodies in 1974.

Leeds United's own version was sung by Ronnie Hilton, and here an entirely correct approach to recording football songs was adopted, namely to keep the involvement of any football players strictly minimal.

Hilton, born Adrian Hill in 1926, was a British crooner who reached the peak of his success in the 1950's by singing cover versions of popular American hits of the day. Once considered one of the top singing talents in the UK, his success was eventually tempered by the incoming rock and roll bandwagon led by the incomparable Elvis Presley. Come the 1960's, Hilton was looking for other ways to put his vocal expertise to good use, and towards the end of the decade he was lucky enough to be approached by a football team with a song and no singer.

Glory Glory Leeds United was the song, and it gave a potted profile of the team's recent successes, the captain, the manager and even the fans in all of its two minutes and forty-three seconds. It even dared to mention rival players and teams in the opening verse:
Manchester can rave about the Summerbee and Best
And there's Liverpool and Arsenal and Spurs and all the rest
But let us sing the praises of the lads we love the best
As Leeds go marchin' on 
Glory, glory Leeds United
Glory, glory Leeds United
Glory, glory Leeds United
They're the greatest football team in all the land
And so the relentless march continued with a comic-book description of Billy Bremner:
Now little Billy Bremner is the captain of the crew
For the sake of Leeds United he will break himself in two
His hair is red and fuzzy and his body's black and blue
But Leeds go marchin' on
By now you're probably getting the general gist, but suffice to say the last verse provides a final rousing mention of the boss and even the noisiest parts of the Elland Road ground:
In the Paddock and the Scratching Shed let's hear the voices sing
Let's get behind United and make the rafters ring
We're a team we can be proud of and Don Revie is the king
As Leeds go marchin' on 
 ...all of which tells you everything you need to know about the song, in essence. Yes, the players can be heard singing on the record, but only for the boisterous chorus which is probably very wise, given the tunefulness of most football players' voices.

Yet if you thought the A-side of this record did well with its various football references and rough, chucking-out-time-at-the-pub-like harmonies, you'd be well advised to check out the B-side, We Shall Not Be Moved. Once again written and sung by Hilton and based on an old standard, this one has even greater player participation and mentions half the First Division league table in the process.

But let's not peak too early. This is but one fine example of the football song. More will follow, you can be certain of that...

-- Chris Oakley
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Sitting Alongside - The Golden Age of Co-Commentary: Part 3

May 8, 2015, 2:24 pm
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The final part of our look at the men who commented on football, but not well enough to sit in John Motson's seat.

Keegan, Kevin

An early example of the superstar footballer snapped up by TV to give a players-eye view of the action being watched. And very well he did so too, first of all joining Brian Moore in the ITV studio for coverage of the 1978 World Cup before taking his place alongside him in the commentary box throughout the 1980's and 1990's.

Polite and discreet while understanding and learning his role, Keegan allowed himself to chip in more often in later years without ever being as pointed or scathing as some of his peers. In trying to elevate his sense of self-importance, his comments occasionally backfired on him, most notably during the 1998 World Cup match between England and Argentina.

After 120 minutes of play and the score at 2-2, everything rested on the final England penalty to be taken by David Batty. When Moore put Keegan on the spot (sorry - couldn't help it) by asking him to predict whether Batty would score, he replied 'Yes' and promptly gave the first live demonstration of foot consumption to a large television audience.

Unfortunate, but by no means the only indicator of Keegan's abilities, for the former England striker was always able to use his managerial experience to give tactical insight where others couldn't. A reliable co-commentator, still in demand on TV today.

Insight - 7.5/10 Speak-when-you're-spoken-to-ability - 9/10 Humour - 5.5/10 Controversialness - 5/10 Delivery - 8.5/10. OVERALL - 7.1/10.

Pleat, David

Just a few years after galloping onto the Maine Road pitch in 1983 to celebrate Luton Town's avoidance of relegation to the Second Division, David Pleat was in an ITV commentary box, giving his views on the 1986 FA Cup Final.

Pleat was on the verge of becoming manager of Tottenham, but if anything it was his media career that was just taking off as his easy-going, informative style of co-commentary was deemed just the ticket for the independent broadcaster. From the late-1980's onwards, his voice and his honest, analytical views were regularly heard on ITV, providing a calming and credible adjunct to proceedings.

Unfortunately, as many in his position do, he became prone to ever more regular verbal gaffs as his confidence grew. Even now, he allows himself every chance to be witty and humorous, although the reality is often somewhat wide of what his intentions are.

Perhaps, however, he can be allowed such indulgence. Whether at World Cups, FA Cup Finals or internationals, Pleat understood the science of football tactics and could count upon such knowledge to bolster his discourse. While not being the most dynamic of personalities he remains, on TV and radio, a knowledgeable and experienced figure.

Insight - 9/10 Speak-when-you're-spoken-to-ability - 7.5/10 Humour - 6.5/10 Controversialness - 6/10 Delivery - 8/10. OVERALL - 7.4/10.

St. John, Ian

Everyone knows that Saint was half of 'Saint and Greavsie', but in fact Ian St. John was an active co-commentator for ITV going way back to 1978. Providing his take on the European Cup Final that year between Liverpool and Club Brugge, he did similar work at the World Cups of 1978, 1982, 1986 and 1990, along with numerous European and domestic cup finals well into the 1990's.

St. John's greatest quality was probably his way of speaking with confidence and conviction. In many ways, it wasn't what he said but the clarity and assertiveness with which he said it, and as a viewer you felt compelled to accept his views, no questions asked.

His delivery was often quite serious, but as someone used to working with the jocular Jimmy Greaves, he needed little persuading to drop his guard and enjoy any humorous moments that came about with a chuckle here and there. Because of that, viewers appreciated the warmer side to his character in contrast to his steely, determined delivery.

In general, however, St. John got the ITV co-commentating nod far more often than his partner Greaves because he could enhance the gravitas of an occasion. As a former player par excellence, he understood the importance of, say, an FA Cup Final from a player's point of view, and the need to take it seriously. This matched the revered tones of Brian Moore and therein you have the ideal partnership, as was shown by his many appearances behind the microphone.

Insight - 9/10 Speak-when-you're-spoken-to-ability - 8.5/10 Humour - 6.5/10 Controversialness - 6/10 Delivery - 8.5/10. OVERALL - 7.7/10.

And now a final look at some of the other names that have tried to convey the excitement of football... with different degrees of success...

Moore, Bobby: A highly underused contributor to ITV's coverage of Brazil v Uruguay and Italy during World Cup '70, Moore's comments were as entirely rational and polite as you'd expect from England's captain. Why ITV didn't bring him into the fold more for the big football occasions of the next decade or two, one can only wonder, but they should have done.

Ramsey, Sir Alf: Ironically, Moore's boss was used by ITV on a few occasions during the 1970's, but he seemed prone to tripping over his words and rushing through his delivery all too often. Lacking any humour and determined to retain as much dignity as possible throughout, Ramsey wasn't exactly cut out for co-commentary work and his appearances in the commentary box were rare beyond ITV's 1974 World Cup coverage.

Robson, Bobby: Another former England boss, although in the case of Robson, his co-commentary days began well before he got the national team job. Bobby Robson was still at Ipswich when ITV came knocking in June 1979, but he showed his versatility by doing well during their coverage of England's friendly match in Austria. Sadly he wasn't used much thereafter and his only other notable co-commentary work came during the Euro 84 Final for the BBC. Another case of 'what might have been'...

And there we have it - a selection of some, but not all of those individuals chosen for their ability to string a bunch of meaningful words together. These are the few that opened their mouths and spoke what was in their minds before their foot plugged the gap - a skill that is never as easy as one might think. 

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The Football Attic's Hit Parade: We're Gonna Do It Again

May 10, 2015, 11:22 am
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It's a warm welcome back now to Dave Burin who continues our series on the great and not-so-great musical exploits of football teams down the years...
Who, or what, is Stryker?  He remains the Ali Dia of the mid-'90s rap scene, having somehow bumbled his way into the studio for Manchester United's 1995 FA Cup Final song, despite by all appearances, having no musical career before or afterwards. Much like the Stig, Stryker's identity is uncertain and possibly secretive. One Channel 4 documentary which focused on football songs claimed that he was an Arsenal fan from North London, though this has never been formally verified. And so, after 20 years of silence from this most enigmatic of one-time shouty football-themed novelty rap creators, We're Gonna Do It Again is the total sum of everything the world knows about Stryker. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

If Stryker did indeed write the lyrics to this bizarre musical hotchpotch, it might be fair to infer that he's gone into hiding. Like the music world's Salman Rushdie, Stryker probably has a bounty on his head from several United fans with long memories, still outraged by their club's name being associated with lines like
"Because we're up there - cream of the crop
You gotta get up early to keep us from the top."
Despite the Reds' dismal display in the ensuing final (they were beaten 1-0 by Everton), what this United squad put their name to on record was undoubtedly more shameful than anything they produced on the Wembley turf.



So, besides the lyrics sounding like a public schoolboy's painfully polite attempt at trash talking, what does Stryker and Man United's cliché-ridden hit (it reached #6 in the UK Singles Chart) actually sound like? Well... there's an aggressive, tuneless drum machine which doesn't fit the melody, and has very likely been left switched on in the background entirely by accident. There's a wall of inoffensive though slightly off-putting guitar wailing in the background. At some point a keyboard seems to drift into the forefront briefly, before fading away - in what is an entirely apt metaphor for Brian McClair's on-field performances.

Around the 2:37 mark, our host clearly decides that things are getting a bit too authentic, that somehow it might be nice to alienate those hardcore Reds who, unaware of what awaits, are queuing up to buy this on cassette (or, for the really trendy individuals, CD). So, he tells us "we'll leave you with a message, Man U for the cup". It's an abbreviation used only as a derogatory term by opposition fans, and lazily by clueless pundits. However, I'd be here for rather too long if I tried to quibble over terminology with a man who spells the word 'Stryker' as if he's only ever heard the word when said aloud by Andrei Kanchelskis.

And yet, for all that, I kind of like it. It's unpolished, it's rather naff, it's full of lines which seem like they might have been scribbled on the back of a shopping list or scrawled down as Stryker woke up at 3am, his head buzzing with puns that don't quite rhyme.  In an era of overly-slick, characterless club songs, or annoyingly ironic efforts (I'm looking at you, I'm From Wigan Me!), there's something decidedly fun and unashamed and cheerful about Stryker's effort.  Now, enough faint praise...onto the B-side.


The best way I can describe the B-Side as is 'listenable'. It is, more importantly than that, incredibly lazy. In 1994, United had reached Wembley with the sounds of Come on You Reds, a catchy collaboration with Status Quo, ringing in their ears. It was the first football club single to reach #1 in the UK Singles Chart. In 1995, they chose as their B-side... Come On You Reds (1995 Squad). That's right. This vastly different version was recorded by the same club just a year later, meaning that at least two different players were involved in recording this completely necessary re-recording of the previous year's cup final song. No version exists online of the '95 track, though if you listen the '94 version and just imagine something exactly the same, you'll know what it sounds like.

Objectively, United may have done better to simply re-release the '94 cup song, and not rope (supposedly) Arsenal mad Stryker out of his (alleged) North London home to rap about "scoring our way to victory". Still, We're Gonna Do It Again is a relic of its time, and for better or worse, it sounds exactly like a mid-'90s attempt at coolness from a football club desperate to repeat its chart success. The tinned drums are dreadful. The vocals are dire. The lyrics are ridiculous. And yet, it's destined to bring a smile to my face every time I hear its refrain:
"Here we go,
Here we go,
Here we go."
I can indeed say that this largely-forgotten hit holds far happier memories than the cup final itself. Just don't expect me to be so kindly nostalgic the next time an anonymous rapper tries to rhyme 'victory' with 'tree'.

Our grateful thanks, as ever, to Dave Burin for a fine guest post. Want to write about football nostalgia for The Football Attic? Get in touch - we'd love to hear from you!
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England's Elusive Missing Moments: The 1966 Saga

May 14, 2015, 6:16 pm
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Peter Prentice recently embarked upon an odyssey to find out what happened to some TV footage pertaining to England's finest football hour. Why did it disappear and what did it contain? Here, Peter presents his findings...

They thought it was all over...

...and so did I when I purchased the DVD of the 1966 World Cup Final only to discover the most complete version in the BBC archive fell some distance short of England's finest two hours. Short by a full nineteen minutes, not including footage masked by action replays.

Those missing minutes were to become an abiding source of curiosity, if not obsession. Nineteen minutes represented a significant portion of the game, especially as the extra-time period appeared largely intact. They had to have contained some action of note. After all, even the most uneventful midfield stalemate has its talking points.

So what were the incidents destined to remain unseen and undocumented for close to half a century?

Until a few weeks ago I thought that a question likely to go unanswered. But now, thanks to the uploading of a substantially longer German broadcast, itself incomplete, the secrets of those missing minutes can at last be revealed.

What they show is that while much of the missing material was inconsequential, there were one or two moments well worth preserving. Chief among them is a Bobby Charlton near-miss inexplicably left out of the BBC edit, and a Bobby Moore cameo that has even the German commentator salivating. They also appear to cast doubt on one of the many legends arising from the game.

Below is an embryonic listing of all the footage exclusive to the German broadcast, which would stand as the definitive record were it without cuts of unknown duration at 01:12:45, 01:24:08 and 01:32:43, and not shorn of a 22-second section at 28:39. It is also lacking some of the post-match scenes of its BBC counterpart.



First Half

00:16 – 06.00
Wembley in readiness – A sweep of the stands - Players and officials wait in the tunnel.

07:23 – 08:10
The teams line up for the national anthems.

10:38 – 11.04
The German players warm up – Seeler with pennant.

17:20 - 17:25
Cutaway to some pensive looking England supporters.

20:21 - 21:50
Tilkowski receives treatment after his aerial clash with Hurst.

22:37 - 23:07
Hurst shoots high wide and handsome from a Ball corner.

24:15 – 24:17
Extended cutaway to England supporters.

25:09 – 25:17
Extended German celebrations and additional footage of goalscorer Haller.

30:44 – 31.01
Hurst receives a congratulatory hug from Bobby Charlton - Cutaway to jubilant home supporters – The scorer jogs back.

49:20 - 52:20
Ray Wilson is forced to head behind after some patient German build-up - Haller's corner is punched clear by Banks – Schnellinger puts the ball out of play – Jack Charlton gets his head in the way of a Siggi Held strike - An England attack peters out.

54:51 - 56:08
A Haller corner is easily gathered by Banks - Cohen intercepts a Beckenbauer pass - A Hunt effort is blocked by Weber - Emmerich wins another German corner.

58:49 - 01:06:17
The teams make their way off and the Band of H.M. Royal Marines takes over – A dissolve to the Royal Box where the Queen refuses to let the half-time downpour dampen her spirits.

Second Half

01:07:27- 01:08:01
Cut-away to crowd – Throw-ins in quick succession from Stiles and Cohen.

01:10:58 - 01:14:28
Moore takes a return pass and flights a long floated ball into the box - Held is flagged offside - A Stiles cross is headed clear by Schulz - Jack Charlton wins a goal kick off Held yet still protests - The combative Stiles incurs the wrath of referee Dienst - Jack Charlton heads behind – A Schnellinger cross is headed to safety.

01:15:36 - 01:17:25
A poor goal-kick from Tilkowski - A misplaced pass from Haller - Some neat German interplay - A swift England counter ends with Peters shooting tamely wide.

01:21:30 - 01:25:20
Tilkowski punches clear – A moment to treasure - Schnellinger shoots over - Peters is again off-target - Moore miscues a clearance - Weber shuts the door on Hunt – Ball runs it out of play.

01:32:07 - 01:33:24
Tilkowski goes down following a collision with Beckenbauer – A Wilson cross is headed away - Bobby Charlton shoots narrowly wide.

01:34:31 - 01:36:20
Hurst just fails to connect with a Hunt through ball after good work by Ball - A Bobby Charlton piledriver is charged down by Schulz - Held hits the side-netting.

01:36:51 – 01:36:53
Additional footage of Ball getting to his feet.

01:38:33 – 01:38:46
Extended celebrations as England go in front.

01:50:43 - 01:50:58
The German supporters celebrate their last minute reprieve - Schnellinger delays the restart.

01:51:23 - 01:54:26
The inquests begin and the players take a breather - Ramsey rallies his troops - Stiles consults with Greaves - The German physios get to work on aching muscles.

(Note #1: If Ramsey really did tell his players to get up and not show the Germans they were tired, there is precious little evidence of it. His captain remains seated as he delivers his defining teamtalk and another England player can be seen sitting down close to the commencement of extra-time.)

01:54:40 – 01:55:10
The inquests continue as the teams prepare for another half-hour.

01:55:19 – 01:55:43
Extended footage of Gordon Banks and a lengthy wait for the game to resume.

Extra Time - First Period

02:06:37 - 02:06:57
Hurst makes his way back to the half-way line - England fans celebrate - The Wembley scoreboard operators are caught on the hop.

(Note #2: The BBC version includes an extra seconds worth of player celebrations.)

02:11:10 - 02:11:26
Hurst and Hunt share a few words before the restart.

Extra Time - Second Period

02:27:11 - 02:28:06
More England celebrations - Hurst and Peters trudge wearily back – Immortality beckons.

02:30:16 – 02:31:38
The German team collect their medals - Weber loses his footing – A well-deserved lap of honour – The England team await their turn.

02:32:07 – 02:32:10
The captain begins the victory parade.

02:32:18 – 02:32:50
England’s heroes take their bow.

-- Peter Prentice
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Videoblog 7: Football kit design folder

May 21, 2015, 9:45 pm
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Way back in March 2012, I wrote an article called 'I was a teenage kit designer'. In it, I confessed that in my early-20's, I went through a short phase of designing football kits using nothing more than some paper and a set of felt-tip pens. Happy days they were, matched in many ways by the reaction to the article that saw lots of people confess to doing the same thing in their own younger days.

It's possible that you may have read my original article and felt short-changed by not being able to see more of my designs. (Possible, and unlikely, no doubt.) If that's the case, feel deprived no longer as The Football Attic Videoblog 7 showcases ALL of my existing football kit designs from two decades ago, just for you.

Experience the hilarity of my whacked-out juvenile imagination, the despair of not creating a single decent England kit design and the eternal hope that one day, just one day, a major manufacturer might be influenced by my efforts. A true rollercoaster of emotions awaits those of you daring to watch this extended-length video full of felt-tip fancies, of that you can be sure.

-- Chris Oakley

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