PROGRAMME IS OVER UNLESS CLUBS GET BACK TO BASICS

MUCH nostalgia this week over the demise of matchday programmes. The Football League will discuss whether to allow clubs to stop publishing them next season. As ever, the ‘proliferation of digital and social media’ is to blame. Fans get their information from different sources these days. They can read the manager’s notes on their smartphone. Twitter tells them the teams. Programme sales have been in decline for years. Yet anyone who has collected them from decades past, or has a stash from previous generations gathering dust in the attic, will know the real reason programmes have become insignificant. They all look the same. No personality. No individuality. The same showy production values, the same appearance, the same design. Too big, too bulky, too bland. It didn’t used to be that way. Derby produced one the size of a newspaper in the Seventies, West Ham’s was small and could fit in a back pocket. The wealthy clubs, Arsenal and Chelsea, went for more expensive paper, even in the days of black and white. Yet the character of each club was on every page. Gradually, that changed. Programmes became matchday magazines — verbose, overstuffed and cumbersome. Insipid features, sponsors’ plugs and padding, when all anyone wants to know is who’s playing. A lot of the old programmes were glorified team-sheets, no more than four pages. The predicted teams were on the back and because they were mostly printed on ordinary paper, the fans could note the changes in pen or pencil. Try to get a biro to write on these modern, glossy efforts. It’s not as if fans are in the ground hours before kick-off these days anyway. They don’t need 68 pages of puff to keep them amused. If clubs went back to the old days — basic look, basic information, sold cheaply and easily stored, programmes might be of interest again. Digital didn’t kill them, uniformity did. Your club, all clubs, are meant to be different.