Football programmes are endangered, enjoy them while you still can

Thom Gibbs Wrexham FC produce a great football match programme where reporter Thom Gibbs helped out the regular sellers at their Tuesday night match against Leyton Orient — Thom Gibbs lends his hand as a programme seller for Wrexham vs Leyton Orient - Andy Kelvin for the Telegraph

The smell of football is so enshrined you can imagine it as a recipe: 200g of fried onions, one tablespoon of cigarettes and a pinch of urine. Less is said about the feel of the game, maybe because so little of it remains. Wooden rattles are long gone, safe standing does not match the mosh pit of old terraces and paper tickets are now scannable QR codes.

So the match-day programme is the last of football’s tactile tradition, but perhaps not for much longer. In 2018, clubs in the English Football League voted to end a rule which made printing them compulsory. Now half of the 24 teams in League Two do not provide a traditional programme. A further 12 from League One and the Championship have killed theirs off, including Blackburn, Swansea and both Bristol clubs.

Ceasing production is usually announced as a “tough decision” or sometimes “an evolution”, usually to digital-only programmes or monthly publications which cover multiple games. Bradford City cited the environmental impact of printing and others show their working. Port Vale claimed a loss of £30,000 per season associated with their programme. Salford City shared gruesome sales stats – their average attendance was 2,779 last season, catered for with 250 programmes. They usually sold around 100.

The general decline of print media is well established, but some clubs persist with pride. Wrexham are a standout in League One, with this season’s covers all loving recreations of previous eras. The 1955-56 season was the inspiration when I visited for their game against Leyton Orient and spent time before kick-off selling programmes. Mark Edwards was kind enough to share his stall for the evening. He is a “twentysomething years” veteran of programme selling at the Racecourse Ground, whose shouts of “Three pound fifty, your match-day programmes!” can probably be heard from Chester. “I have been told to quieten it down sometimes.”

A host of old match-day programmes - Andy Kelvin for the Telegraph

As we chat his uncle John takes over his duties and greets a steady procession of familiar faces. There is a permanence to Mark’s position near the away end at Wrexham’s home games, a comforting presence at a much-changed club. The sense of community is clear. Phil Bagnall buys two copies, one for a friend at his local, the King William in Summerhill, who used to attend to every game before his disability slowed him down. Phil’s programme gives him a link to the club he still loves.

Thom Gibbs helped out the regular sellers at their Tuesday night match against Leyton Orient. Pictured is programme seller John Edwards. — John Edwards selling programmes at the Racecourse Ground - Andy Kelvin for the Telegraph

Glenys Wilkinson has been coming to Wrexham for “many, many years” and always buys a programme. “We’ve had quite a few new players so I use it to look at the numbers. I haven’t got a smartphone, I would be unhappy if they went digital. When I go to bed I read them cover to cover because it tells you everything, and about the other team.”

“We always give each other a hug at the beginning of a season,” says Mark. “Sometimes you even get a Christmas kiss.” There are around 180 copies on his stall tonight and business is brisker than expected, although sales tend to be higher at the beginning of the season. Mark does not accept the occasional offer to keep the change. “I’m not here to diddle anyone. Sometimes they say ‘give it to the club,’ well the club doesn’t actually need it now.”

During my stint I encounter a mix of characters. The no-nonsense completists, overwhelmingly male, who pocket the programme immediately. The stop-and-chatters, for whom the product seems secondary to the warmth of conversation. And a surprisingly high number of younger people, often with their parents.

Hannah Jones is with father Mike and says: “It’s nice to have a physical thing, to remember a game by. You can take photos but you can lose them and you can only have so many on your phone. So I like collecting them.” Darren and Rosie, unrelated Joneses, are here for Rosie’s first ever match, and the programme is an obvious souvenir. Young couple Ffion Pearce and Jack Williams are print holdouts in a digital generation. “You get a lot in it for £3.50,” says Pearce. “Reading online, you don’t feel the nostalgia or the passion as much.”

“I’ve got one at home from the Stockport game a few years ago when we scored two late goals,” says Williams. “If you’re reading about it online you’re just going to forget about it. Looking at it, it reminds you of something.”

Beautiful as it is, few Wrexham fans will be looking back on the Orient programme with much fondness after a 2-1 defeat.

Nostalgia alone may not be enough to save the programme. Every year brings news of more clubs who have decided to stop producing. Fans’ groups sometimes fill the gap with unofficial replacements, but purists yearn for the officially sanctioned real thing.

Stuart Curtis is managing director of Curtis Sport which makes programmes for Celtic, Leicester and Norwich among others. For a big match at Celtic it will print around 10,000 copies, but it is still a struggle to engage younger fans. “If it’s not on a phone it’s hard to get them into it.”

That can feel like a hopeless fight. Programmes once provided information unavailable anywhere else. Now stats and line-ups are a few taps away from your home screen. Online programmes can offer a fair facsimile but do not feel like a viable substitute. “You’ve got to have the product, smell the print,” says Curtis. “It’s a very physical item isn’t it? You can’t read a 64-page programme on your iPhone.”

Still he argues that programmes are not the millstone they are sometimes presented as, especially not in the context of player wages. “It is very difficult to not make money out of a football programme. Clubs get all the advertising revenue, but that may not departmentally be allocated as it should be. It may not look like it’s covering its cost at the turnstile, but chances are that a programme might have £3,000 to £5,000 worth of revenue from advertising in there. It’s nigh on impossible to lose money.”

The demise of the medium has been forecast for some time, but it has been more resolute than some expected. Curtis says: “I came into the industry 16 years ago and someone said ‘I give programmes five years.’ Well, here we are.”

General view of a programme seller outside the stadium before the match — Many clubs have stopped producing physical match-day programmes - Carl Recine

The challenge is to make the traditional programme as appealing as possible. Curtis’s company has trialled an album given away at the beginning of the season, with each issue of the programme including new stickers. The market for vintage programmes and fairs is healthy and, after some years of bloat, most clubs are going back to basics. “At the turn of the 2000s things exploded too quickly and we were getting 100-page glossy brochures with spines on. Some of them were like War and Peace. I don’t really think that’s where programmes need to be at the moment. It just needs to be the news and record of historical fact, really.”

The question is whether that makes the programme necessary. There are fond memories of the Rothmans Football Yearbook, but few searching for stats mourn the days of perusing them, rather than the ease of finding the same information online. A more potent argument is for programmes providing evidence of attendance. “The programme is the only physical remnant of what might be your first game, something to mark that occasion,” says Curtis. “It’s the programme which says ‘I was there’.”

Dave Smith deals programmes through his site programmecollector.net. There are 73,279 currently listed, although he is slowly processing another 80,000 in storage. “My day is taken up working full-time, then when I go home in the evening it’s just on the computer, scanning and listing.” He echoes Curtis’s point about less being more. “A lot of programme collectors like the old 1960s versions, which were probably just 12 pages of basic info, but actually looked like a programme. Now a lot of people see programmes as a magazine and don’t hold them in such high regard.

“I think it’s very sad that some clubs have stopped producing. It is quite reassuring, and I know they’ve got the money to do so, but your top clubs, Man United, Man City, Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea, all still make a programme and in sufficient quantities. It always seems to be the clubs that have either fallen on hard times or are being mismanaged, they are the first ones to pull the plug.”

There will be no shortage of those and it seems inevitable that more programmes will die. But given the love which still goes into the form in places like Wrexham, there is still hope. In the era of the automated turnstile you can easily attend a match now without making eye contact with another human.

Buying a programme demands some interaction, so they become more than spareroom space-hogs. Some optimism too in the idea of them as niche objects, a retro medium ready to come back into fashion. If vinyl can thrive again, why not the programme?

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