FKS: The Wonderful World of Soccer Stars Gala Collection (1970/71)

Just off Oxford Street in London lies 175 Wardour Street, today the site of an unassuming shop selling photographic equipment but 40 years ago or more the location for FKS Publishers Ltd - Britain’s answer to Figurine Panini.

FKS were responsible for a whole range of football picture collections between 1966 and 1982, and their first domestic set was published in time for the 1967/68. Here we focus on their fourth, a collection extravagantly named ‘The Wonderful World of Soccer Stars Gala Collection.’ It’s mission was to document the stories and, to a greater extent, the players of the 1970/71 campaign. Being FKS, however, the end product was a little, how should we say... ‘erratic’ in quality.

The front cover provides an all-action shot from an England v Wales international featuring, among others, Geoff Hurst and Mike England. With the FKS logo in one bottom corner and the album price of two shillings and six pence (12½p in new money), we were all set for a rollercoaster ride into the colourful world set before us.

Except colour was rather at a premium for the first few pages of this album. After a Table of Contents and a title page, we then had another black and white layout this time showing the league tables from the previous season. As is always the case for anyone hopelessly nostalgic about football, a casual glance across the four divisions in England and the two in Scotland provides many a reason to smile. Look - there’s Everton, the league champions... Huddersfield Town, champions of Division Two sharing a table with Aston Villa, next to bottom and relegated to Division Three... and whatever happened to Barrow and Workington, eh? A different world indeed.

A wordy review of the 1969/70 season occupies page three, outlining the key events in a way Panini never bothered with. Successive pages tell of the events in the 1970 World Cup, Feyenoord’s European Cup Final win over Celtic, Manchester City’s European Cup-Winners’ Cup success and Arsenal’s clinching of the Fairs Cup. Plenty to read, then, should the thrill of collecting football stamps wear off in a hurry.

Yes, ‘stamps’ - not stickers. The technology to produce self-adhesive pictures was no doubt still being developed at the time, so instead FKS sold you seven stamps per packet (price 6d/2½p) and invited you to apply glue to the top edge of the back of each one. Applying them neatly would ensure that when the glue dried, you could lift up each one to read the player biography printed underneath. A nice touch that ensured more stickers could be crammed in on each page, but one had to wonder how much those pages would flap around in the school playground when a freak gust of wind blew up.

And what of the pictures on the stamps?  It’s fair to say things start well with the first half a dozen or so teams featuring players consistently either ligging around on the playing field or shown in a head-and-shoulders format.

Curiously, things start to go a little awry when we arrive at the Everton page. Here we get our first chance to play ‘Spot the Odd One Out’, the winner in this case being Tom Jackson who seems to be standing in front of a very large banana, one might presume. Similar acts of individualism also appear, such as Leeds United’s Rod ‘Fetch Me A Ladder’ Belfitt or Liverpool’s goalkeeper, Tommy ‘Drowning in a Cyan Sea’ Lawrence. As for Southampton’s Denis Hollywood, it’s anybody’s guess as to the friendship he’d struck up with the photographer.

With the First Division team pages out of the way, we move onto a three-page feature called ‘Second Division Star Gallery’ - essentially a display of 44 players gracing the second tier with their skill and professionalism. Admittedly not every name catches the eye and because the team names are only specified on the back of each stamp, one cannot always be sure who the players play for at first glance.

That aside, some names do ring out from the crowd. We see future Arsenal manager Terry Neill (a player-manager with Hull City at the time) along with future England goalkeeper Peter Shilton, still learning his trade at Leicester City. Malcolm McDonald is there in the white shirt of Luton Town and over the page we get the unlikely sight of Ron Atkinson, Terry Venables and Rodney Marsh all in close proximity as if to give us a foretaste of TV punditry to come.

If this large cross-section of Second Division talent wasn’t entirely satisfactory for you, there was always the opportunity to send off for a printed sheet featuring your favourite team. Yes Watford fans, the order form on page 38 was there to help you get a special piece of paper that you could attach to the largely blank page called ‘Favourite Second Division Team’. A nice idea that presumably generated a bit of revenue for FKS back in the day, while at the same time saving on the cost of ink where the album was concerned.

To round things off, the focus turns from domestic league football to international competition and here we get a page each for Celtic and Feyenoord, finalists in the European Cup the previous season. The Dutch side successfully became the first non-Latin team from outside the British Isles to win the trophy, a remarkable feat made all the more potent because one of their players clearly wore spectacles.

The last page is titled ‘Star Players of Mexico 70’ and features sixteen players that graced the World Cup shortly before this album was published. Each and every one of them from Bobby Moore to Pele are shown on flat single-colour backgrounds, presumably to emphasise their special status, but more likely to mask the questionably dull location they were photographed in.

So all in all, what do we make of this album and it’s non-Panini exuberance?  Generally speaking, it’s pretty good. Most of the stamps feature decent pictures, although some are let down by a huge amount of modification in the colouring department. One only has to look at the peachy-looking faces of the Blackpool players or Keith Weller’s flat blue Chelsea shirt to know there was something funny going on there.

One could also point to the ‘interesting’ poses chosen by the photographers for some of the shots. Even without the players whose heads only just emerge above the bottom of the stamp, there are some seen with their arms folded, some seen with their backs to camera and some with their eyes practically shut. Not exactly the stuff of Panini, and yet it’s forgiveable somehow.

Cramming 420 stickers into 28 pages is no mean feat, and to produce so much content of such a generally high standard back in 1970 was an incredible achievement. FKS is therefore to be congratulated for their 1970/71 Soccer Stars collection. Things could have been much worse... and having seen their sticker books from the late-70’s / early-80’s, we’re here to tell you they pretty much were. For now though, enjoy this for what it was - simply a great picture stamp collection that Panini themselves would have been rather pleased with.

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Neil Cotton: Five shirts from my past

In the latest in a long line of excellent guest posts from writers far and wide, The Football Attic welcomes Neil Cotton from the blogsite Row Z. Neil's unearthed some long-forgotten football shirts from his wardrobe and here tells us how he came to own them and the memories they bring back...

The writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin once said that “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories” and chaotic certainly seems a good word for the football shirt collection which I recently uncovered nestling in an unassuming, perfectly square cardboard box which had in turn spent the best part of a decade residing forgotten at the bottom of a wardrobe. This seemed to be a collection without a theme or any other sense of order, but as I unwrapped each shirt memories came rushing back as if each were a tiny time-capsule.

England (home, 1995-96)

The story of Euro 96 is a familiar and much told one; the time when football did not so much come home as come in from the cold wilderness years of the preceding decades. In the summer of ’96 it seemed football was truly everywhere and the success of the tournament played in the bright new stadiums that came with the Premier League era spoke of renewal and optimism. Labour would sweep to power less than a year later on the back of D:ream’s anthemic song ‘Things Can Only Get Better.’ Euro 96 also coincided with a transitional period in my own life. I had at long last finished school and was looking forward to the future beyond, but in the meantime my summer consisted of watching the games on TV, spending long evenings in the local park using the cricket blinds as oversized goals and curling in free kicks from a distance until the light finally gave out and it was time to return home and catch Jennifer Aniston in Friends on Channel 4.

Saint-Etienne (home, 1994-96)

Is it OK to develop an allegiance, however fleeting, for a football team on the basis that one of your favourite bands is named after them? I’m not sure either, but this is how the St. Etienne shirt came to be in the collection. St. Etienne (the football team) were once the dominant force in French football but whilst Saint Etienne (the band) reached number 11 in the UK chart in 1995 with the single ‘He’s On The Phone’, St. Etienne (the football team) were but a shadow of their former selves. They finished in 18th place and third from bottom in Ligue 1 at the end of the 1994/95 season, but they were spared relegation when Ligue 2 champions Marseille were denied promotion. The reprieve, however, would only be for one season and they were finally relegated to Ligue 2 the following season when they finished in 19th place. The shirt, perhaps fittingly for a club with its best days behind it, looks to the past with its lace-up collar – fashionable at the time, but strangely something you don’t see much anymore.

Southampton (home, 1995-97)

As a Southampton supporter, the mid-1990s was a miserable time, not for the growing realisation that in the new economy of football my club would never amount to anything but relegation fodder, but for the shirts designed by unfashionable kit manufacturer Pony. The lesson from this shirt is that retro and polyester don’t mix - though Umbro would later show how it could be tastefully done with the clubs 125th anniversary, but as a season ticket holder I was required to own this shirt and wear it week in and week out, pulling on the polyester monstrosity each Saturday morning with the same weary resignation as a teenager getting ready for their Saturday shift in Woolworths.

Millwall (away, 1995-96)

A dull day being dragged around Lakeside was made worthwhile by coming across this in a chain sports shop. In an age of the kind of identikit shopping experience ushered in by mega-malls like Lakeside, the only ever nods to localism were the one or maybe two shirts belonging to lower league clubs hanging alongside the usual suspects; the Liverpool, Man U and Arsenal shirts which you could pick up from Exeter to Edinburgh. For part of the 1995/96 season it seemed Millwall might join these big-boys in the Premiership, but for a spectacular implosion following manager Mick McCarthy’s departure mid-way through the season. At one point Millwall had been top of the league but slid towards eventual relegation on the final day of what turned out to be a poor season. Nice away kit though.

Feyenoord (home, 1994-1996)

It’s strange to think how much has changed in a decade or so. Just take this Feyenoord shirt; now thanks to internet shopping and sites like eBay you could probably find one for sale and place an order in less than 10 minutes without so much as moving from your sofa, but in the days just before the internet really took off this shirt was an exotic rarity which had to be tracked down and snared. I obtained it from Soccerscene on Carnaby Street - an Aladdins Cave of football shirts from around the world - which I discovered thanks an interview with The Beautiful South’s Paul Heaton, himself an avid shirt collector, in a magazine whose name I have long forgotten. Like many of the shirts at the time it features a collar, something I think all football shirts should have – I mean would Cantona have had quite the same presence had he been wearing Man Utd’s current sans collar shirt?

Our thanks go to Neil for giving us his football reminiscences. If you've got some football memorabilia tucked away in a cupboard somewhere that you want to tell us about, drop us a line to admin [at] thefootballattic [dot] com and we could end up publishing them on The Football Attic!