Chasing Paper

I once read a report of a chap who planned to go to a football match, but when he arrived at the ground, discovered that the programmes had all been sold, so instead of watching the game, he turned on his heel and went home. That tale may be apocryphal,  but on balance, I rather suspect that it is true: in fact, I would go as far as to say that it has possibly happened more than once.

Upon reaching the turnstile and finding that there were no programmes, our man went home - apparently.

The more sceptical among you may doubt that anyone would plan to go to an event - be it a football match, a play, or a concert - and not actually watch it because of the absence of a programme, brochure, or similar publication, but there are some football-goers for whom the 90 minutes of action on the pitch is but one part of the experience of going to a game. And I say football-goers rather than supporters because these are the chaps (and I would guess that most, if not all of them are men) who do not follow a particular team, but rather troll around the country (and overseas too, on occasion) taking in games and ticking off grounds. Frequently they visit and 'tick off' other places too, like pubs in The Good Beer Guide, or railway stations.

A selection of non-League programmes from eBay.

It has always been my belief that while women love to make lists (usually To Do lists, often with plenty of things for their men folk to do), men love to tick things off lists, and football provides ample opportunity for that. Apart from the Premier League and Football League clubs (ninety-two in total), there are almost 900 clubs playing non-League football down to Step 6 (that's six promotions below the Football League) at what one might call 'proper' football grounds (i.e. terracing, some cover, floodlights, bar and catering) who will normally also issue programmes. The 92 Club accepts as a member, anyone " who has already attended a first-team competitive fixture played at the current ground of each of the ninety-two clubs of the Premier League, Championship, League 1 and League 2 during those clubs' current period of membership of the League." There is no formal club for the other 891 clubs outside the top 92, but that does not mean that there are not people trying as hard as they can to visit all of them. There is, however, a handy website (https://www.footballgroundmap.com/) that allows you to log the grounds you have visited. According to that, I've been to 190 grounds, but given that the site lists 2,163 in England. Clearly, I have a long way to go. Thankfully I have little intention of even trying to get anywhere near all them  (or even a quarter of them), but I have no doubt that there are people desperate to work out how they can visit them all (before starting on another country).

I'll hold my hands up now and admit that when I go to a football match, I do like to get a programme: I might even be a bit disappointed if there was one printed but I could not get hold of a copy, but if a club doesn't issue one, then it isn't the end of the world. Out in my garage I have a number of boxes containing the programmes I have collected over the years. Sadly, during one of my many house moves during the mid-1990's when my life was somewhat turbulent, one box has gone missing. All of those that remain (bar some Romford FC programmes that are from the period before I started watching them) are from games I have actually attended: at one time I had a large number of programmes I had bought from dealers or football club shops, these were discarded many years ago. An exception is a programme from the 1949 FA Amateur Cup Final, the first ever played at Wembley Stadium, between Bromley FC and Romford FC, which I bought on eBay a year or so ago. It remains the most expensive programme I have ever bought (it was about £15), but obviously nowhere near as expensive as some you will find online or at auction - the most expensive, for the 1882 FA Cup final between Old Etonians and Blackburn Rovers, sold at auction for a world record £35,250. That clearly is an antique and has rarity value, however even recent, more mundane - and one would think, more common -programmes sell for decent prices.

For the football goer who must have a programme, there is now another piece of paper to chase; the teamsheet. Once found only in the press-box, teamsheets are now produced by clubs at much lower levels of the game than in days gone by: the affordability of printers and other computer equipment has made sure of that. So now it is not unusual to see a club official distributing teamsheets prior to a game, which on occasion provokes a rush to grab one from the assembled groundhoppers[1]. 

From The Non-League Paper, Diary of a Groundhopper regularly
demonstrates the importance of the match programme to such visitors.

These days, as programmes rarely feature team line-ups that are even vaguely accurate. At all levels of the game - not just in the Premier League - many now just list each clubs' squads,  and the days of the stadium announcer declaring, "United's team is as per your programme" are long, long gone. As a result, the teamsheet has started to assume greater importance, hence the frequent scramble to obtain one when they appear.

But the humble football programme may, just may, be on its last legs. The internet has supplanted it as the football fan's major source of information about his club, teamsheets provide a more accurate guide as to who is playing, and in any case, print deadlines mean that programmes can never be as up to date as the websites that all leagues and clubs now have. When I write an article for my club's programme it is not unusual for me to find that between my emailing it to our programme editor and the date of publication, whatever  I have written has been overtaken by events. Many clubs now offer their match programmes in digital format and the Evo-Stik South League no longer makes it compulsory for clubs to produce a physical programme, a digital one is deemed adequate and Uxbridge FC recently announced that they will trial issuing only an online programme this season.

The online programme has plenty of advantages: it won't sell out, won't get wet or crumpled in the rain, and collecting them won't take up vast tracts of your living space. The groundhopper who went to the ground only to find that all of the programmes had been sold could have downloaded one on his phone. Unfortunately, however, he couldn't have written the team changes and the score on it.

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[1] Groundhopper: Someone who visits as many grounds as possible, although there is more, much more, to it than that. Groundhoppers frequently construct complex rules that determine the circumstances under which a ground, or club can be ticked. This blog, http://onion-bag.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/definition-of-groundhopper.html goes some way toward explaining the phenomenon.