Fantasy Nostalgia: Subbuteo 1900

While writing our recent article about football cigarette cards from 1938, it occurred to me that the game of soccer in the UK back then must have been a very colourful one indeed. Like many of you, I've occasionally seen pictures of footballers from the early twentieth century and marvelled at the garish colours and antiquated styles of the uniforms worn in that long-forgotten era.

But the thought quickly came to mind that if football really was so colourful back then, what would a Subbuteo poster from that era have looked like if the game had existed?  It was at this moment that I hatched a plan to create the image you see below:

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To be specific, I tried to create the image of a Subbuteo poster as it may have looked back at the start of 1900. The teams that are featured are from the Football Leagues of England and Scotland during the 1899-1900 season as well as international teams. Not that there were many of the latter; only England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales were playing football at international level until 1902.

Where the kits are concerned, I've used artistic license from time to time where specific details were unavailable for the start of 1900. In those cases, I've used an approximate image based on the nearest kit recorded to that date. In short, this is a very generalised depiction of the kits being worn back in the day.

As for the poster itself, I've kept the styling fairly simple to maximise overall clarity because if the Victorians liked one thing, it was ornate decoration. Don't get me wrong - I like a curlicue as much as the next man, but one can have too much of a good thing.

Anyway, you're invited to click on the image for a closer look at the teams playing at the start of the last century (apologies for small index text, by the way), and if you can't find your favourite club, they either hadn't been formed, hadn't joined the league or were operating under a different name back then. No prizes for identifying any teams in the last category!

(To view the image at full size, left-click on the image above, then when the image appears on your screen, right-click on it and save it to your computer. Once there, you can view it in a graphics package or Windows.)

Subbuteo poster, 1983

Nothing could be more guaranteed to brighten up a young child’s bedroom wall than a Subbuteo poster. It’s been proven scientifically, probably. By the time this masterpiece came out in 1983, the masters of the flick-to-kick revolution had been annually publishing posters and catalogues for decades, each with its own distinctive graphics and identity.

The premise, as ever, was a simple one: to show off the myriad teams and accessories available to buy for the avid collector. Here, those same teams could be seen surrounding the big football motif; row upon row of colourful sporting soldiers, marching (as best they could when their feet were glued to a hemisphere) across this parade of printed perfection.

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As is always the case, it’s the vast array of team strips that captivate the idle dreamer. Chances are you wouldn’t end up buying many of them, but that’s neither here nor there. This was a chance to wonder at the well-established kit designs we all knew and their exotic-looking counterparts. Who in their right minds, for instance, wore the pink-purple strip with a white chevroned shoulder panel on the shirt, numbered 341? What sort of team wore the white shirts with a big black plus sign, numbered 91? And just who was it that prescribed the increased medication for the designer of kit 83, probably the only one featuring two parallel slanted stripes on only one side of the shirt?

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These questions and many more were prompted by the endless gawping and gazing on the part of the Subbuteo fan, yet this wasn’t a confusing landscape to find oneself in back in the day. This was an entertaining education in the art of football kit design. Look carefully and you’ll find Coventry’s ‘Talbot’ kit (378) – banned from being shown on TV, remember – and a series of funky NASL outfits (540 – 560). Then there were the teams from Brazil, Argentina, Europe and South Africa.

But that was just the front of the poster. Turn it over and there you’d find two full listings (one alphabetic, the other numeric) to help you identify which team wore which kit. This time, instead of the designs being exotic, it was the names of the teams that sent the mind racing. The West German clubs alone sound bizarre in a modern-day perspective; who knows how strange they sounded then. Has anyone ever heard of Wormatia Worms, Kickers Offenbach or SpVgg Bayreuth? Thought not…

As for the big football on the front, there were all the usual bits and pieces on show to make your Subbuteo collection that little bit more special. The two stand-out items for me, however, are the Skills Trainer and the Team Carrying Case. I wanted the former SO badly when I was a kid. The very thought of practicing my shooting by flicking the ball through those obviously-way-too-small holes seemed like Subbuteo nirvana to me, let alone dribbling around the miniature plastic cones.

As for the beautifully designed carry case, even my juvenile self saw through the initial allure of this one. The clear cover on a green plastic tray capable of housing two teams for transportation looked amazing when I was 12, but how would I carry my other 16 teams with me? I had the answer in the form of an old carry case designed for holding LP’s. It was far bigger and could contain my scoreboard, TV Tower and lots more besides. It even had a handle.

All of which goes to prove that where Subbuteo was concerned, it was best to suspend your awareness of practicality, even if you were at such a young age. Design was the thing to appreciate, whether you were dealing with a brightly painted team of players, or a poster showing you all the things your heart desired.

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Subbuteo Catalogue 1973-74

Before I start, a slight disclaimer. This isn't a catalogue in the way we normally think of such things these days. It's actually a folded poster, but given the fact that it lists all the Subbuteo teams and accessories available to buy throughout the 1973-74 season, one shouldn't be too critical - not least at this early stage.

And not least too because this is a lovely piece of football memorabilia that evokes that charming crudeness that comes with all things created decades ago. The cover, for instance, shows us four young Subbuteo players from Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany extolling the virtues of this truly international table soccer game. Throw in a few tried and trusted stereotypical phrases from the continent ("Wunderbar!") and you're off to a flyer.

Elsewhere on the unfolded front of this big 50 x 70cm poster, there were neat pictures of 'some exciting accessories by Subbuteo', if indeed fence surround panels could be deemed exciting. Still, to the young boy or girl entering this plastic fantasy world, what could be more thrilling than the thought of buying some splendid floodlights or indeed a pair of new 'World Cup-type Goals'?

If that wasn't enough to satiate your Subbuteo appetite, you could also pass a spare half-hour pondering on which boxed set you'd like for your next birthday or Christmas, perhaps. There were several sets to choose from, the best of which was the all-new 'Munich World Series Edition'. Cunningly tied in with the upcoming World Cup in West Germany, this was the set that had it all including scoreboard, floodlights, TV Tower, ball boys, England team and "literature." Presumably the complete works of Shakespeare were not included in this respect.

Even if you'd picked up this football-dominated poster by mistake in your local toy shop, you were still potentially catered for. Subbuteo's now famous dalliance with rugby and cricket could also be found in miniature form along with Snooker Express, a game rarely heard of these days. In it, you had to flick a snooker player (think typical Subbuteo football player but dressed formally, chalking a cue) onto a small plastic cue ball in the hope that it would in turn pot one of the other coloured balls into a pocket. The whole thing was played within the confines of the box lid and was, by all accounts, fiendishly difficult to play. Full marks to Subbuteo for at least trying out the idea, though.

All this, however, was merely a sideshow for the main event. Without question, the vast majority of people buying this poster - sorry, catalogue - were doing so because they wanted to gawp longingly at the 165 kits displayed on the 'International Team Colours Chart'. Here there was the annual opportunity to wonder at the colours and designs rarely or never seen before.

Which team wears sky blue shirts with royal blue hoops? Who plays in red shirts with a white diagonal sash? Who on earth plays in all black with yellow trim?  Such were the inconsequential ponderings generated by this arrangement of player figures stuck into a white board and photographed for our pleasure.

When it came to answering the aforementioned questions, we did, of course, need a list and one was provided across almost the entire reverse side of the poster. Though Subbuteo in more recent years gave us the basic details of team name and number sorted alphabetically or numerically, here we had a grid containing sub-divided columns for Shirt and Short Colours (but not socks), 'English League First, Second, Third and Fourth Divisions, Scottish, Irish and Welsh Teams' plus 'International and World Cup Teams'. All delightfully over-complicated, despite the top border of the poster claiming this to be a "simple chart."

As is always the way, what you see by scanning across the vast lists of teams is a snapshot of world football as it was almost 40 years ago. There are Football League teams that no longer exist (Southport, Workington), teams that no longer occupy today's global spotlight (Rot-Weiss Essen (Germany), Red Star (France)) and teams that are frankly just misspelled or misunderstood (Atletico Bilbao, Fiorentino, etc.)

There's also a healthy supply of club teams from apartheid-era South Africa such as Cape Town City, Durban United and Southern Suburbs. Though Subbuteo would ultimately branch out into the world of NASL within a few years, this was the only way for players of all kinds to get a sense of club football beyond continental Europe back in 1973-74.

As if all that wasn't enough, you could always go for something completely left field where your team choices were concerned. You could pick up a Southern League team or two if the likes of Bishop Auckland and Burton Albion were your thing, or what about FC Subbuteo (Barcelona) or even United Kingdom?

There really was something for everybody back then, and amazingly this wasn't even the peak of Subbuteo's popularity. Happy days.