Would you start collecting if you were 11 yrs old in 2023?

[derby1884]

Stuck in traffic this morning due to the interminable roadworks in Aberdeen, I got thinking about my childhood and how, at the age of 11, I decided "programme collecting was for me".

But it also got me thinking that, were I an 11 yr old football fan nowadays - would I feel the same? Probably not, I thought.
Back then, it wasn't the history of one particular club or the game in general that enthused me - it was owning one programme from each of the 92 League clubs.

But that can't be done now.

And it wasn;t till I saw an advert for "The Ram" in 1974 that I wrote to the club and subscribed. Via the club.

Can't do that now either.

The 10-15 yr olds of today are the ones who, in 40 years time, will be where many of us are now. Hunting down the single sheet rarities and reserve aways at Bury or friendlies at Glossop or in Austria or wherever and paying/offering silly money for them.

Or will they? There's so much competition for their attention now, so much emphasis on the "big" clubs, the "superstars", that even my rather naive goal of a programme from each club (which took me till I was about 14 to complete) seems at best quaint, at worst pointlessly eccentric.

Someone convince me this hobby isn't not so much dying as becoming the preserve of an ever-dwindling collective of....well, of us.

Simple question to end this rant - how many collectors under the age of 16 do you know?
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[Tynie Topics]

Programme collecting, like shirts and LP's and the like, are now the preserve of the middle age, and that is who you see coming into the hobby as opposed to the younger generation.

Retro is big business, people with grown up (or no) kids, chase their own childhood memories through items from the past.

The hobby in Scotland is undergoing a bit of a revival with regular fairs which we've not seen for 20 or more years. Not many kids though.
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[sharrowblade]

Both of you touch on things that are so true.

But, its very rare for anyone to start collecting anything from a young age and continue to adulthood, in any hobby.

Kids play with stuff... rather than collect it.

Today's generation.... the average 11 year old will spend his £300 Christmas money on a new North Face Jacket or a pair of trainers.

How cool is it for them to tell them they'd just spent loads on a handful of 1940s programmes rather than a new set of headphones?

My teenage years were spent on records and video games but I wasn't buying them to collect.

I took the lads when they were 5 or 6 down to a Model railway exhibition in Sheffield for a couple of years, the displays were mind blowing, the attention to detail superb but like one of the enthusiasts said 'We cannot keep the youngsters involved long enough because there is so much competition when it comes to hobbies'.

So programme collecting is not on its own.
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A Sheffield United Programme guide

[colchestersid]

£300 Christmas money



My 9 year old boy it's either Lego, books or a new game for his Nintendo Switch

Programme collecting comes later these days - I think it starts in 30's/40's with nostalgia for teenage years and either grows from there or fizzles out

Be interested to know however what sort of age groups are spending big money on limited edition football cards and stickers?

[grantham]

I think you will find there is quite a large youth section that spend their money on shirts. The random/mystery shirt box market has certainly grown over the last 5-10 years.
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[stfc831968]

My Uncle who took me to my early matches gave me his programmes when i was probably around 11 and that was what got me hooked, without that i may not have had the interest i have.

However, would i start now if i was 11. Hard to say but i don't have any real interest in the modern programmes so less likely than back in the 70's when i started going to football.

Living away from Swindon it was how i kept up to date with things, now i can find out everything online.

[flashhat]

I think the recent revival was born from Covid, where'd we be now if Covid had not struck, I for one would certainly be richer than I am now
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[derby1884]

Steve Earl rarely, if ever, had Mansfield programmes on his catalogue. Accordingly, Mansfield were, for a wee while, the only one of the 92 clubs I didn't have an issue for.
I wrote to the club and added on an extra 20p in my postal order.

Back came a programme - and I had one from all 92 clubs at last!

I think laying all 92 out in my bedroom and thinking "I've done it" was perhaps as good as it's ever got in terms of collecting.
Getting the last of the 45/6 Derby aways or the missing 55/6 at Barrow was satisfying.....but it lacked the "YES!!!!" effect that I can still recall when that Mansfield issue turned up.
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[Chris1963]

To answer the thread question - possibly not, but hard to say really. But's let's look at what happened when I was a year older at 12, which is the age I attended my first ever match, Oxford United v Bristol Rovers on Saturday 6th December 1975.

The irony is that it was my father who unintentionally got me into the hobby, despite not being a collector himself. (he had been more of a player than a spectator in his youth)

When we arrived at the Manor Ground, we went through the turnstiles on the Osler Road side and found an ideal vacant space at the perimeter wall. At that point I was unaware that there were such things as programmes, and did not see any spectators reading copies. My father then said to me "I'll go and get a programme" and my first thought was "How obvious! Why didn't I think of that before!" even though I had never seen one before. Anyway, he soon came back with a copy, which was one of the newspaper-style (folded into A4) issues that Oxford were doing that season. I think my father's motivation for buying it was that he wanted to see who was playing in the game.

After the match, I left the programme lying around the lounge for a few days until it mysteriously disappeared, possibly thrown away by my mother who in all probability thought it was just another newspaper. I felt disappointed at this loss and so I took the precaution of keeping all future Oxford issues stashed away in my bedroom, which is how I became a collector. (I managed to get a replacement for the missing Bristol Rovers issue some years later from the Bristol Rovers club shop)

[Dorking]

I blame my collecting on my late Grandad who got me a stamp collecting album. He worked in a sub post office for maybe the last 20 years of his working life, so I got lots of stamps from him, and he taught me all about keeping he stamps in a methodical order, he got me a bottle of 'stamp lift' etc - in short he developed an obsession with collecting things.

It became standard to collect football stickers in the Panini albums (because all the kids at school did), and then when I got to go to football matches, of course I wanted the programme.

I am sure I saw the Steve Earl advert in the back of Shoot magazine probably before I even started going to games, so I knew collecting programmes was a 'thing'

[littlewiggy]

I'm of the opinion that collecting isn't ever a conscious choice, it's a gene or something inside you that you're born with.

Take me for example, I'm the lad at school who never tried in lessons, I was disruptive, often aggressive and far more interested in girls & football to ever consider taking Maths seriously. Much to my bitter regret in later life.

Yet, according to my mam, I was "always nerdy." Obsessed with facts, always with my head in a book. My collecting probably began unconsciously when I used to keep all my "Shoot" & "Scoop" mags pristine & neatly stacked in my otherwise untidy bedroom. My mates used to tear the team group pics out & put them on their bedroom walls, but I couldn't bear to defile them.

The item from my early childhood I remember most vividly was the small-but-extremely-thick "News of the World Football Annual" that I bought with my birthday money in 1976 or 77, aged about 8. I devoured the information in that book like a sponge, just couldn't put it down. Before long I could recite the name of every league ground, every club's nickname and every FA Cup final back to the Royal Engineers.

As my mam said, I think despite my outward behaviour, I was simply born a nerd.

Needless to say, I soon began using my pocket money to send off for these "Programme Catalogues" I saw advertised, and found them fascinating. There was no going back after that, I'd passed the point of no return!


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[Flaming Pie]

As Chris1963 said it sometimes is really only by chance that you start collecting certain stuff. Up until the early 1960s l had the odd programme from the three Merseyside League teams, New Brighton had gone by then. Then my father had a new workmate at Littlewoods Pools, Birkenhead. His name was Billy Dean, the great Dixie Dean himself . They were porters carting bags of football pools coupons around the building . From then whenever Dixie was mentioned in a magazine or newspaper l would get my dad to get Dixie to autograph the article. He was a kind bloke and would often get me autographed programmes and other memorabilia. Luckily l kept all of these items from when l was a kid for many years but sold them a few years ago. Here’s a press photo of Dixie( centre of photo) with his workmates at Littlewoods Pools mid- 1960s. The other photo has been seen on the forum before . It’s my mate Littlewiggy checking out the badges outside Anfield, 1970s

[littlewiggy]

Yep, that's me, I picked up a couple of beauties that day!

Your dad having the immortal Dixie as a mate must have made you the envy of your chums, Pie!
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[Flaming Pie]

Littlewiggy, l remember having quite a lot of those little signed publicity photos of Dixie holding the FA Cup 1933 that l would just give away . There was also a proper leather football that he threw to me at some charity match fully signed by Dixie, Tony Kay and others . I ended up playing football with it later that day and messing up the signatures . You don’t realise that years later this would be sought after memorabilia. I remember you saying that he travelled to Newport for the Brian Harris benefit game . Did you get anything signed by him?

[Pete’s Picture Palace]

Some nice stories here.

My own collecting started in 1962, when I went to my first Palace home game and when my big brother (who didn't collect) went to Brighton v Palace in Jan 63 and brought me back a programme. Until then I hadn't seen an away programme before and my eyes popped. In addition my neighbours were also regular fans and we all used to go to home games together - there were 4 of them, dad, mum, older girl and younger boy - he was (is) 5 years older than me. His dad only had a motor bike but then he bought a three-wheeler car and they started to travel to away games - and get me all the programmes, that was about 1964 or 65. Sadly there wasn't room for me in their car. But finally I went to an away game, with a school mate and his dad, by train - Southampton on 7.11.1964 - I was 8 - and on the train coming home there were 2 blokes walking up and down the carriages with cases full of programmes they were selling. I know I had sixpence to spend and I went to see what they had. At threepence each, they had Sheffield Wed v Man Utd 30.3.60, and Blackburn v Ipswich LC 11.12.61. I had never seen programmes like those 2 before so I splashed my cash - and I was well and truly hooked.

And I have wondered ever since who those 2 blokes were with cases of programmes.

Nobody else in my family collected anything - just me - though to be fair, my dad was away in WW2 in Burma when the Luftwaffe dropped a bomb on his parents' house and destroyed his beloved stamp collection, and his bike! Luckily, his parents were out at the time!

[Chris1963]

Dorking wrote:

I am sure I saw the Steve Earl advert in the back of Shoot magazine probably before I even started going to games, so I knew collecting programmes was a 'thing'

For some reason, I never bought or even read a copy of Shoot magazine until the summer of 1976 so would have been unaware of the programme advert in it.

[ndg1860]

Some great stories here and I'd like to add mine as it is rather unusual. Yes, I am a serious QPR collector, but more on that later.

A few may know that I actually come from Australia, growing up in Sydney and then living in Canberra until not long prior to migrating here (blame that on the missus). I did not get involved with football in any serious way, bar playing, until the early 90s but also was not collecting then. For the 1995-96 season (the top league played summer), a Canberra team joined the National League and I chose to start a web site with some reports when I travelled with the team to Sydney as well as keeping stats. In 2000, just after the Sydney Olympics, I joined a second tier team as media officer/programme editor, though I had already been an editor for a small newsletter for the local Canberra league for two seasons and had also been a journalist for various football magazines and newspapers. That actually got me going and then I was given boxes of programmes, plus lots of other more interesting items, from various people. In the mid-2000s I became involved in the Schoolboys internationals and was manager of the Australian Schoolboys for their 2006 tour of New Zealand (in Australia the coach is equivalent to the manager here) and also created the programme for the tour plus the tour of the UK in 2007 - so, if you ever see that brochure I designed it.

So, from there I got more and more interested. But I was also a QPR fan and upon my partner moving to London in 2016, I started to also collect QPR. Owing to restrictions of visas, I travelled back and forth quite often each season until I was able to stay from the end of 2019. Thus from 2016, my primary collection has been QPR and now I have around 4,400 first teams programmes. However, I also collect Australian and NZ items, especially pre-1960 and some 1970s items as well as Internationals. Australia, about a decade ago, chose no longer to create programmes of any nature, the media and marketing person stating that they were for anoraks only and thus not worthwhile. Tynie and I work together to build up a nice collection of these Oz and NZ items. I should also add that I have the largest collection of the 1937 FA XI tour of Oz and NZ memorabilia, including almost all of the programmes.

As to the question, I do feel that answer would be no. Kids now, as opposed to when we were that age, have so much more they can do. Yet, possibly the most important negative here is that so many clubs are halting their print production and moving to digital. Kids will not collect digital.

[Chris1963]

ndg1860 wrote:

Australia, about a decade ago, chose no longer to create programmes of any nature, the media and marketing person stating that they were for anoraks only and thus not worthwhile.

That's a shame really, as they did a very good programme when I saw them play South Africa in two friendly internationals (a joint issue for both games in Adelaide and Sydney) during my June 1994 holiday there. Hopefully they will do a programme for the Women's World Cup later this year.

[derby1884]

littlewiggy wrote:

I'm of the opinion that collecting isn't ever a conscious choice, it's a gene or something inside you that you're born with.

Yes, I would wholeheartedly agree with you there and I've read an academic paper which backs up this theory.

It's not just football programmes with me, it's also 45s/LPs by my fav bands, books on specific true crime cases, Mike Leigh films, Tony Hancock radio episodes etc etc etc. I have a checklist and it niggles me until all those boxes are ticked.

If I was to be brutally honest, it's no longer the actual item that's the shangri-la. It's ticking that box to say I've "got" it. Often the item, as and when it arrives, just gets filed away with barely a glance.

Being a Derby collector since 1975 and living up in Aberdeen all that time, it's not as if I've ever had much face-to-face contact with fellow collectors down the years. So it's been an oddly solitary hobby.

Which probably isn't very healthy when I take a step back and consider it.

But i do yearn for the innocent days of the early 70s when Steve Earl's "bumper package" would be waiting for me when I came home from school. Loads of 60s/70s programmes - worthless now - but blimey did I read those from cover to cover.

Those days are long gone.
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[ndg1860]

Chris1963 wrote:

ndg1860 wrote: Australia, about a decade ago, chose no longer to create programmes of any nature, the media and marketing person stating that they were for anoraks only and thus not worthwhile. That's a shame really, as they did a very good programme when I saw them play South Africa in two friendly internationals (a joint issue for both games in Adelaide and Sydney) during my 1994 holiday there. Hopefully they will do a programme for the Women's World Cup later this year.

That is an interesting question but I think for such a big event they may do so. New Zealand certainly will. When they had the centenary celebration matches last September - it was the centenary of the first internationals by both teams when they played each other in 1922 - Australia did not provide a programme while NZ did.