Is the football season over?
If I’m honest, I truly have no idea. My team, Coventry Sphinx, finished in April. The Premier League and EFL have been done for weeks and even the Play-Offs have been played off.
There were English teams in competition in European finals and those too have now been completed. So are we done? When does next season become this season? Now? July?
If it’s normally at the end of a major international tournament then what’s the effect of the scheduling of the Women’s World Cup this year? Does the women’s calendar affect the parameters of the men’s season? Is there even such a thing as a men’s season?
Who cares, right? Well, riddle me this: how am I going to come up with a weekly topic to ramble on about for the next two months?
Wish me luck. You’re going to need it.
Why the hell do people collect football programmes?
In my bedroom in the house I lived in between the ages of ten and sixteen there was a large see-through plastic storage box. In this box sat a couple of hundred matchday programmes, the amassed souvenirs of matches at AFC Bournemouth and Aston Villa throughout my childhood.
There were only two programmes from games I hadn’t attended. The first was a thin, yellowing paper number from a pre-season friendly at Dean Court that happened before I’d even been to a football match and was presumably watched by my dad. The other, a copy of the Villa News & Record from an historic UEFA Cup win against Inter Milan, was picked up by my uncle.
Every other programme in that box was mine. For every game a programme and a programme for every game. Many were signed before Bournemouth fixtures by the likes of Scott Mean, Vince Bartram, Steve Fletcher, Scott Murray, Neil Masters, Steve Jones and who even knows who else. Efan Ekoku, probably. Maybe even Buster Merryfield.
They should have been prized possessions but the truth is they were disorganised and badly kept and I have no idea whatsoever what became of them. None.
I feel a little guilty about that but certainly not regretful. I’m not a football programme collector. I don’t have the necessary internal wiring to understand the attraction of stockpiling something big enough that a serious collection demands you rent it a flat. I don’t have the space in my house or my brain.
Admittedly, there is a modest collection building just over my left shoulder as I type. It contains every home programme from Coventry Sphinx since the beginning of the 2018/19 season. Somewhere on the property is stashed an unloved bag full of Tooting & Mitcham United programmes from 2011/12.
Turns out I do care when I make them myself. Anyway, as a non-league programme editor I have huge respect for the collector even if I’m not one myself. As a sociologist I’m intrigued by them. What is it that makes these bizarre little magazines – and all manner of other memorabilia for which we’ll continue to use programmes as a proxy – so important?
Some people just have to collect. Psychologists sometimes describe it as an urge or an impulse. Sigmund Freud (a collector of a few things, incidentally) theorised that it’s associated with childhood toilet training challenges and – and! – as a “redirection of surplus libido onto an inanimate object”.
The English game has a handful of Holy Grail programmes. Original copies from matches like the 1966 World Cup Final or the 1968 European Cup Final can move for hundreds or thousands of pounds because they have the three things a collector needs: they’re scarce records of history in a quantifiable series.
There’s something about scarcity that strikes at the collector’s very soul. In the early 1990s Russell W. Belk, an American academic and consumer behaviour expert, linked the act of collecting to possessiveness, materialism and a need for control. Programme collecting is a good example of why that connection – while Belk makes no claim that it’s universal – exists.
A more recent study of the links between collecting and adaptive evolution found that collecting might enhance “survival and reproductive success”. That’s right, folks. Programme collectors are sexy bastards.
Rarity breeds exclusivity. Exclusivity breeds demand, then desire, then realisation and possession. Collecting objects like football programmes packs a thrill beyond the worth of the items themselves, including, occasionally, as a quite real investment.
One of the overlooked strengths of ye olde matchday programme is as a record of history. It’s documentary evidence in the most literal sense; it’s full of information that serves both as an historical snapshot and a source of knowledge about what came before it. News, match reports, results, even statistical data are listed for the ages.
As a record of the past, the document itself is arguably even more important than the details within. The most potent collectibles are those with a pronounced emotional bent and football programmes have that sewn up.
Programmes connect us. To our clubs. To one another. To football culture in a much broader sense. Even for non-collectors they’re often part of the matchday ritual. That’s why I had so many as a kid. It’s also why I produce one now, years after they stopped being mandatory in our former league.
As football supporters we trade on memories and moments – the stories we tell about the teams and players we love and hate, and the sights and sounds and smells that can only come from being there. It naturally follows that it’s spawned an enormous nostalgia satellite economy.
What proportion of the people who buy programmes are collecting the object and how many are instead collecting the moment? Programmes are proof of attendance and it’s the attendance, the experience, that actually counts. Just ask any one of Britain’s legion of groundhoppers.
For them and other collectors printed football programmes exist as a measurable series to tick off. They’re like Panini stickers except you don’t need to sell a kidney to fill up a season’s worth. Matchday programmes form sets and subsets, date-stamped if not numbered, and therefore offer the prospect of completion. Freud would have loved that.
Academics usually agree that collecting involves a personal challenge and sense of achievement – it’s a competition against ourselves.
Studies (including a series of experiments a decade ago by human resource management academic Howard J. Klein and the wonderfully named social psychologist Zlatan Krizan) show that self-competition is crucial to the achievement of our individual goals. When we play games against ourselves, we’re driven by the will to win.
Acquiring a programme collection that would sink a small boat isn’t for me but I completely understand the impulse.
In many ways, it’s strange that I don’t buy them. I value programmes massively as proof of the enduring demand for physical media, as contemporary records and as a social ritual in a sport whose primary role is, to me, to provide precisely that.
If you enjoyed the main piece, please share this week’s newsletter using the button below.
“The reforms of the two major tournaments will ultimately increase the number of games played by top players who could conceivably feature in both. This poses a threat to the wellbeing of players who are already pushed to their limit with the current international match calendar.”
So sayeth Fifpro. I have other criticisms of mammoth international tournaments (in short: they’ll be shit) but the conflation of fixture congestion and risks to player welfare is a matter about which I don’t entirely agree.
Player safety matters in the elite game as it does everywhere else. That goes without saying. But if you’re operating at a level that brings in internationals, continental cup competitions, overseas friendlies and the like, the fixture calendar is just part of the game. You’ve got the resources. Work around it.
Salty beef extracts
The dismal story of modern football can be summed up in two words: Manchester City (The Guardian)
Jude Bellingham is 19 years old but ready to be Real Madrid’s everything (The Guardian)
Lucy Ward: ‘I loved Leeds … now I look at the club through different eyes’ (The Observer)
The finalists' dilemma (Getting CONCACAFed)
Man Utd lost the FA Cup final because of David de Gea – the rebuild starts with letting him go (i)
Dessert
AC Milan’s new home kit from PUMA. Smouldering.
By the way…
High Protein Beef Paste is a free newsletter.
While it’s possible to pledge, I don’t ask or want you to do so.
However, if you’ve enjoyed my writing over the years you might consider purchasing a Systematic Decline art print or a This Decay t-shirt.
I’m open to writing commissions and artistic or t-shirt collaborations. Get in touch if you’d like a chat.
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
Don’t be shy when it comes to sharing the newsletter. If I can get a decent handful of subscribers I can sack off Twitter and isn’t that the dream for all of us?
Have a week.