Retro Round Up - 5 April 2013

Our weekly selection of the best retro football articles from across the internet over the last seven days...


First up, The Goldstone Wrap remembers happier times for John Gregory while a player at the Goldstone Ground...

The Vintage Football Club brings us The French Olympic team that faced Israel in 1976, featuring the future President of UEFA...

There's been many a club badge discarded on the rubbish heap of football history, but Chris Wright of Who Ate All The Pies has unearthed 20 of the best for our viewing pleasure...



Old School Panini immortalises Sir Alex Ferguson’s career in football cards and stickers

Blackburn v Blackburn? Certainly - if the kit man makes a cock-up, as is proven by Got, Not Got...

Craig Easton was inspired by The Football Attic to write about his favourite football kits... check ‘em out here!

..and lest we forget, long before FIFA drew up their plans for world domination there was another World Cup - as remembered by Frankly Mr Spencer...

But that's not all!

By way of a few bonus extras, here's a selection of fine bloggers that have taken up the League of Blogs challenge and written all about their kit and badge designing efforts...

• Wrong Side of the Pond
• The Goldstone Wrap
• World Cup Legends

The Football Attic Guide To... Team Photos

Ever since the day when 22 men first walked onto a field to kick about an inflated pig's bladder, the practice of taking a team photograph has been a mainstay in the football world. With the constant need to worship the sporting heroes put before us, we, the fans, have demanded the imagery that maintains and strengthens the love we have for our teams. To see a picture of the team we support is to reaffirm our pride and dedication.

Yet the act of capturing the physical and spiritual attributes of a given team is nothing if not a fine art. Merely snapping a picture of a group of men standing next to each other in the same outfit is only the beginning. There are many other things to consider if you want to create a truly epic team photo, so to illustrate that point we’ve put together a special Football Attic Guide for anyone needing to know how to do it right.

Right: Manchester United
Wrong: Notts County

1. Personnel 

To begin with, choose your subjects well. Obviously you’ll need at least 11 players, but you may wish to assemble a full squad, in which case a sense of strength and superiority can be implied through association with massed army ranks.

It’s also worth considering whether or not to include the manager, trainers, coaches and other hangers-on as too many people can make the shot look overcrowded. Let’s face it: who wants to see the club secretary?

An additional point: Make sure your team are smart, properly washed and groomed to create a positive image. Persuading your long-haired loons to take a haircut isn't compulsory, but in some cases it can make the overall picture look much tidier. Or to put it another way, if an Arsenal-era Charlie George makes his way in front of the camera, tell him to take the afternoon off.

Attic Tip: If your team wears stripes, an abundance of players in your picture can induce vomiting and nausea. Proceed only after seeking medical advice from your GP.

Right: Blackburn Rovers, Bristol City
Wrong: Southport, Sunderland.

2. Formation and composition

The traditional approach is, of course, to have two or three rows of players, each one ascending in height to create a pleasing image. This has become the de facto way to present your team picture over many decades, but with a little creativity and originality, new life can be breathed into the old format.

Take the camera angle, for instance. Instead of positioning the camera centrally in front of your subjects, put it to the left or right and arrange your players to stand in a line. The sense of perspective will draw the viewer’s eye towards a non-existent imaginary point in the distance, thereby creating depth.

Similarly, elevating the camera to look down on your team, if arranged correctly can be a welcome change from the traditional seated-and-standing approach. Here, sensible experimentation is encouraged.

Attic Tip: Under no circumstances be tempted to arrange your team like a set of ten-pin bowling skittles. It’s not clever and it’s not funny.

Right: Everton, Ipswich Town.
Wrong: Seattle Sounders, Houston Hurricane

3. Location

It was Clement Attlee’s Labour government of 1945 that passed a law stating that all football team photographs had to be taken in a footballing environment, be it “a stadium, a training pitch or, if no alternative exists, an indoor training facility.” Apparently. That’s why most team photos look the same.

And why not - it’s where your team look at its most natural, its most jovial and its most believable. It’s for that reason why - and we’re sorry to say this - experimentation must never be considered.

The moment you take the team away from the pitch, you take away its sense of meaning - its raison d'être, if you will. Shipping your players to a strange and inappropriate venue only causes confusion and anxiety for the people looking at your photo. It may seem harsh to be so strict about these things, but believe us, it’s worth it in the long run.

Attic Tip: Putting your team on an airport runway or in a verdant sub-tropical scenario is something you’ll regret for the rest of your days as a team photographer. Please don’t.

Right: Walsall
Wrong: AFC Bournemouth

4. Wardrobe

If you’re going to mark the occasion with a commemorative photograph, tell your team to make the effort and put their brand new kit on. It’ll show up lovely in the final prints, it really will. Failing that, last season’s jaded old kit will do, but looking smart is the key and there’s no excuses for scruffiness.

Having said all that, wearing a new kit for the team pic can backfire on you. If it happens to be lary, flash or in any way extravagant, it’ll be immortalised for years to come on football nostalgia blogsites where it’ll be made fun of in a cruel and relentless way. Possibly.

Due care must therefore be taken in deciding exactly which kit to wear on the big day and if anyone suggests wearing suits instead of playing kit, kindly tell them where to go. This is a place for tracksuits at best - not an off-the-peg number from Next.

Attic Tip: If your kit looks like it doesn't belong to any particular era you can think of or has been chosen as the winner of a Blue Peter ‘Design a Football Kit’ competition, it’s probably best to leave it in the changing room.

Right: Manchester City.
Wrong: Wolverhampton Wanderers

5. Success

Finally, if you've got the location right, the outfits right, the people right and the composition right, all you need do is consider the final cherry on the cake that can make or break a picture.

In a word, trophies. To give the impression that your team is successful (even if it’s not), do yourself a favour and find as many trophies as you can. They don’t even have to be related to football - just find something that you can put on the ground in front of the team to show they’re really going places.

Nothing impresses like success but though it’s great to be able to show off a European Cup or a Premier League trophy, not everyone can do so. That’s why it’s good to take a walk down to your local pub and ask them to borrow that tarnished old cup you won for winning the darts tournament six years ago or that wooden shield with the shiny engraved name plates all over it. No-one will ever know the difference and you might just attract the attention of an interested foreign investor to your club.

Rebadge the badge

You might be surprised to hear this from us, but the world of football nostalgia isn’t as perfect as it might seem. Oh sure, we’ve allowed entire months to pass us by while thumbing through our pile of old Panini albums, but that’s not to say everything in this Elysian netherworld is as cracked up as it ought to be.

Take football badges, for instance. At first sight, nothing could be finer than a vast array of club insignias displayed in collective formality, each using colours and motifs to represent a team you probably don’t support and could care much less for. Yet each one has been crafted and honed by skilled artists and designers to symbolise the hopes, ambitions and dreams of an ever-changing army of players and fans alike.

At least that’s what you’d think. Unfortunately some club badges, historic and long-standing though they might be, are far from perfect and... well there’s no easy way to say this... are in need of an update.

Normally such talk of modernisation is an afront to our very nature, but here at The Football Attic we believe perfection is achievable if you wish hard enough for it. So let’s see if we can identify those club badges that are long overdue a refresh and work out how to make them better.

Southampton

On the plus side, there aren’t many English football club badges that have a football scarf on them. Come to think of it, there aren’t many that have a halo on them either, but the inclusion of both here somehow add too much quirkyness and informality to the Saints motif. At least there’s some sort of Southampton coat of arms on display, but even then it’s possible to argue that it’s not the most evocative example of local heraldry.

So what can we replace it with?  Well perhaps a saint of some sort... the patron saint of sailors, given that Southampton is one of England’s major sea ports. A picture of St. Brendan, then, framed in a circular ribbon featuring the words ‘Southampton Football Club’ with small anchor motifs dotted in the sky behind our newly-chosen saint. What more could you ask for - it’s got history, reverence, local history and not a single scarf in sight.

Birmingham City

You’ve got to hand it to the St Andrews club - they had international ambitions, but they came to nought. Their current badge, implemented in 1976, features a ribbon and a globe atop an old-fashioned football the like of which one associates with Bobby Charlton and 6-3 defeats to the Hungarians. Original, distinctive, but starting to look a bit tired now. Let’s see what we can change it for...

How about a football featuring a stylised swirly-whirly pattern in blue designed to look vaguely like Spaghetti Junction, the famous motorway interchange resident in England’s second city since the mid-1960’s? Below it in a suitably serifed font could be the name of the club and either side of the ball could be ‘18’ and ‘75’ to show the year in which the club was formed. A modern logo-style badge, admittedly, but one that would see it through another decade or two before the inevitable next redesign.

Norwich City

English club badges featuring birds of one sort or another come ten-a-penny, but not many feature a sweet domestic caged bird constantly fearing its inevitable destiny in the jaws of the humble family cat. Yet that very creature, bright yellow upon a green shield and perched on a ball, has survived well since its inception as part of Norwich’s club badge in 1972. The canary. that is - not the cat.

The problem is, it’s a bit boring, frankly. Canaries by their very nature have little to offer beyond tweeting incessantly until someone tells them to shut up. (Any comparison with Stephen Fry, incidentally, is entirely inappropriate.) Far better, perhaps to have the magnificent spire of Norwich Cathedral on display within a similar shield, flanked on either side by lions (given that there’s one on the Norwich coat of arms). The finishing touch?  The name of the club written in full below it in a modern, bold, sans-serif font. Piece of cake.

Blackburn Rovers

Ah, that trusty old red rose. How very redolent of natural beauty, how very English, how very... badly drawn. Time to get rid of it, methinks. I mean how you can you have a team known far and wide for wearing white and blue halved shirts and not have that incorporated into the badge, for heaven’s sake?

Here’s how you do it. First, you take a circle, slightly stretched top to bottom to make it an oval of sorts. Across the bottom, you have some black wavy lines to depict the ‘burn’ bit of ‘Blackburn’ (it means ‘river’, you know). Above it, the oval is split in two vertically so that the left half is white, the other is blue. In the white half, you have a picture of a mill to reflect Blackburn’s heritage as a wool-weaving town, and on the other you have a sheep - the provide of the wool. As ever, the name can go below somewhere, preferably in a font such as Times New Roman. Heritage, colours and relative imagery, all present and correct.

So there you have it - my own masterclass in how to freshen up those tired old club badges. Nothing could be simpler, and if you wish to prove that by suggesting redesigns of other club badges, drop us a line to admin [at] thefootballattic [dot] com or leave us a comment on this post. We look forward to hearing from you.