Sadly the fate of football programmes lies in the balance with clubs set to vote on whether the issuance every game should remain compulsory. Sales are down across the country and for non league teams selling a handful of copies these labours of love may be soon a thing of the past.
That would obviously be a great shame on many levels. I grew up collecting Arsenal programmes but space and costs mean I no longer collect a whole season, rather just the games I go to. I remain though an avid collector of past home programmes and each one provides a little snippet of a time long gone, a time my parents would be familiar with but an era that will be all but ignored no doubt by my son and his generation as they push the old man to buy the latest computer game.
Programmes are more than a record of a match. They are a social history. They catalogue times past with words and pictures and I for one never tire of seeing action pictures showing familiar stadiums with most unfamiliar architecture.
I recently picked up a copy of an Arsenal programme from the 1950/51 season against West Bromwich Albion. This Division One game, remember that? was played at the end of September and the team line up featured the likes of Wally Barnes, Leslie Compton, Joe Mercer and Jimmy Logie. I grew up with the Arsenal just as the players of this generation were being buried; I never saw them play but had read enough about their exploits to know how deeply ingrained they are in the psyche of out club.
But while the programme is fascinating as usual what lept out at me on page five was a small advertisement. Hard to believe now but Arsenal for so long turned their back on commercialisation. The club boasted about not having advertising boards around Highbury for example and adverts in the programme were all but non existent. The only exceptions seemed to be for local music halls and train travel.
There was no Netflix back then, no DVDs, no videos and no colour TV. Entertainment was more social and long before Simon Cowell came along and created superstars entertainers had to reach the top through good old fashioned hard work and that meant travelling round the country playing any venue or dive that would offer them a night or two. For the thespians treading the boards, and the likes of Morecambe & Wise began their careers in this way, stardom came via a long hard slog if it came at all.
You can almost taste the woodbine in the air as fans took their leave of Highbury after the game and some of them, feeling the night was still young, would have headed up to Finsbury Park perhaps for the pubs or pool halls. Or some would have headed to the Empire to catch the latest vaudeville act in town. And on this particular evening it was the less than politically correct Lester and his, umm, troupe.
Later generations would have teddy boys, mods, punks and binge drinking to look forward to but in the 1950s there was the chance to roll up and gawp at small people.
The programme of course also has plenty of football snippets among it's 16 pages but this small ad speaks volumes of its times. And let us not forget today's programmes filled with international brands targetting the international audience Arsenal attract. In 1950 the Arsenal were a north London club and their fan base was drawn from the streets around the ground.
