Catalogue of Eras: Freemans - Autumn and Winter 1979

It's Christmastime... there's no need to be afraid... That's because your Mum bought all your presents back in October using her Freemans mail-order catalogue. Who needs to go into a shop to buy Christmas gifts?

Back in 1979, the home shopping boom was in full swing as women up and down the UK (never men, of course) were filling out their application forms to stock up on everything they needed for a Yuletide to remember.

But what to get for little Johnny, the football-mad little scamp whose very existence revolved around soccer? To begin with, how about Freemans' wide selection of boots? From the gorgeous red stripes on the Adidas Inters to the stomach-turning green stripes of the Adidas Madrids, there was something for everyone and every budget.

Personally speaking, I had a pair of boots similar to the Gola Speedsters (pictured left, F) when I was young, but in all honesty I was rather ashamed to wear them most of the time. My reasons were twofold. Firstly, they had moulded studs. For any eight-year-old wanting to look his mates in they eye with pride, moulded studs were a complete no-no. Only 'proper' studs would do if you were to convince everyone you were the next Kevin Keegan.

Secondly, the name Gola equated to 'Cheapo' back in the late 1970's. An esteemed heritage in the manufacture of sporting equipment they may have had, but they were no Adidas and all my mates at school knew it. I therefore tried my best not to be seen in public sporting my Gola boots for fear of being pointed at and laughed out of town.

A pity, then, that Freemans had so many pairs of Gola boots on sale in their catalogue, but I dare say many children of my age ended up owning them. Either that or they're decomposing horrendously slowly at the bottom of a million and one landfill sites.

But hey - you don't have to be playing football to wear your nattiest footwear! When mooching around the house, you could still look the part (and look a prat) with a pair of 'soft fabric slippers with football scene vamp-print', whatever the hell that was. Perhaps that's shoe-making terminology for 'blurry image of the 1979 FA Cup Final'. Alternatives were available showing Kermit the Frog or Spiderman, but neither of them could stick the ball in the net like Alan Sunderland, so yah-boo to them.

The natural accompaniment to your elastically-gusseted slippers was a colourful three-pack of Tufsox, Each pair featured an image of a footballer only slightly better defined than your average page on Ceefax, and was made in a beguiling blend of nylon and polyester. It was difficult not to be attracted to socks like these, but then again even low-flying satellites would have been attracted to them what with all the static you'd have been generating.

How about a game of football before bed, though? No, not real football - Foosball! Freemans had not one but two foosball tables, one a cheap six-a-side version, the other a full eleven-a-side edition where both teams wore colourful kits reminiscent of that time when Colombia played Romania in the 1994 World Cup. (And before you ask, I have checked - Carlos Valderrama does not feature in this version).

As I recently mentioned on Football Attic Podcast 21, I used to own a foosball table when I was young. More than anything else, I remember the constant times when I tried in vain to bring the ball back into play whenever it rolled into the corner, beyond the reach of my rod-mounted players. Not for me the scoring of a Ronnie Radford-style netbuster; instead, the technical limitations of the game's design that required all too many drop ball situations.

Do modern-day foosball tables have some way of ensuring the ball is always reachable? Are the corners of the pitch sloped so that the ball always rolls back into play? If anyone knows, do get in touch...

You'll notice I cunningly said 'a game of football before bed' earlier with all the subtlety and poise of a highly-respected writer. I did so to lay down a smooth path towards the next item on the list which is a set of football pillowcases. (You don't get this kind of subtlety with Barry Glendenning, you know...)

There were three pillowcase designs to choose from, all printed in red, and all, totally coincidentally, sporting the name of a First Division team that plays in red - Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool.

As you can see, the same rather crude illustration formed the basis of each pillowcase, for singular pillowcase it certainly was. They weren't even sold in pairs, and yet each one on its own would have cost you £2.75 back in 1979. To put that into perspective, if you scaled that up to take inflation into account, they would set you back £13.79 each in today's money. Not exactly 'Bargain of the Week', I think you'll agree...

But enough of this undoubted mail-order flotsam and jetsam. What your 9-year-old self really needed was proper football stuff, and it was provided in spades on page 771 of Freeman's 'club book' bible. Here was where you'd find ACTUAL FOOTBALL KITS AND TRACKSUITS... as long as you supported Liverpool or England. Or both.

Still, PHWOOOAAR, eh? I mean look at those replica kits... don't they look fantastic? Virtually spot-on in every detail and as authentic as you could ever have wanted. Granted, the England kit by Admiral only had about six months of shelf life left before it was replaced by The Greatest England Home Kit Ever ^®, but no-one knew that at the time.

The tracksuits were the same - beautifully executed and just like the real thing. But what about the price of all this stuff? Did Mum and Dad have the moolah to kit out their child in the style of Kenny Dalglish? Well a full replica Liverpool set from the Freemans Autumn/Winter 1979 catalogue would have cost you £8.95 - that's £44.88 in today's money. The 2014/15 equivalent from the Liverpool FC official online store costs £68.97 - that's an increase of 54%. Proof, if it were needed, that kids these days need very well-off parents to help them emulate their football idols.

It was far more economical to buy a 'football and goalie gloves' set instead to keep little Johnny occupied - particularly if he was a Chelsea supporter. The gloves, endorsed by 'The Cat' himself, had a big 'B' on them (which, frankly could have stood for so many things) and were suitable for 'dry weather' only - ideal, then, for the four days in every UK calendar year when conditions were entirely suitable.

As sick jokes go, however, the '12-panel laceless (i.e. made after 1964) football' must surely take some beating, for here was a cheap replica of the exact ball that eluded Bonetti three times in England's defeat to West Germany in the 1970 World Cup. The makers even managed to get the exact colour match by taking samples from a beige Austin Allegro.

Can you imagine Bonetti wanting to be reminded of that when he put his name to such a gift set? Perhaps it's no wonder that he retired mid-way through 1979 to become a postman on the Isle of Mull in order to get away from such things.

Finally, as was often the case with mail-order catalogues of this kind, there was a selection of books to calm the minds of young kids and First Division goalkeepers everywhere. Not that there were any football annuals, mind - just a big old tome entitled 'Purnell's New Encyclopaedia of Association Football'.

Running to 190 pages, it was a fairly generic compendium of records, statistics and various other facts and figures, the like of which many kids (such as my juvenile self) found fascinating while waiting to become a mature adult. Whether the book was more fascinating than actually being a mature adult is a matter for personal opinion, but at least you'd have been happier receiving it as a Chirstmas present than 'Purnell's Pictorial Encyclopaedia of Horses and Riding'. Bleggggh.

-- Chris Oakley

All images featured on this post copyright their original owners and used for the purposes of review and illustration. No attempt at superseding original copyright has been made or should be inferred.

See also:

• Catalogue of Eras: Marshall Ward - Autumn and Winter 1975-76
• Catalogue of Eras: Littlewoods - Spring and Summer 1982

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Football Special 79

Somewhere between the lunacy of FKS and the gold standard of Figurine Panini, you’ll find AVA Americana and their sticker collection, Football Special 79.

In an age where several manufacturers where vying for supremacy in the football sticker market, Panini were already the yardstick by which their competitors were being judged. To beat the best, sticker collections like Football Special 79 had to offer something a bit different - something… well, ‘special.’

AVA Americana were a Munich-based company that had dipped their toes into the UK sticker market twice previously during the 1970’s. On this, their third and last tilt at greatness, they created a set of 384 stickers to be housed in a 60-page album. Quite whether you’d call the collection ‘special’ is a matter for personal judgement, but it was certainly different from the equivalent being sold by Panini.

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Waddington's Quiz Card Games - Football (1979)

When it comes to football card games, you’re nobody unless you have the words ‘Top’ and ‘Trumps’ on your packet. Yet if the passing of time tells us nothing, it shows that every once in a while, a new title would come along in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of young football-loving children everywhere.

One such title was made by Waddingtons, the iconic name linked with all-time classic board games such as Monopoly, Risk and er… Wheel of Fortune. In 1979, Waddingtons hit upon the idea of producing sets of cards featuring quiz questions on various subjects, one of which was Football. Others included Cricket, Pop Music and, bewilderingly, the Highway Code, but whatever the subject they all had the same basic gameplay.

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Peter Pan Pocket Pop-o-matic Football Game, 1979

Back in the days when a 'handheld device' meant nothing more than a few bits of plastic in a cardboard box, there was the chance to play football on the move - wherever you happened to be. That is, of course, if you had either (a) a healthy imagination or (b) very low expectations.

Following not very hotly on the heels of Pocketeers 'World Cup' in 1975, Peter Pan Playthings, that maker of games such as 'Test Match' and 'Frustration', came up with their Pop-o-Matic Football Game. 'Pop-O-Matic', you'll remember, was that cunningly useful system designed to stop little kiddies losing their dice when playing board games. Never more was it needed than in a game that could conceivably have been played in the back of a car or in the school playground.

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Panini: Euro Football 79

My failing memory doesn't recall Panini's Euro Football 79 being on sale in the UK when I was a kid. If that's the case, it's an almighty shame because this, for me, was one of the best Panini sticker collections ever made.

It's not just the variety and quality of the stickers inside the album that elevate it to such a celebrated plain, but the simplicity and logic of its structure. In basic terms, the album was split into three parts, one for each of the European club competitions that existed back then. Within each of those parts were five sub-sections containing a Roll of Honour, pictures from the previous season's Final, the fixtures for the upcoming season (1978/79), the teams involved in them and the players to look out for. Nothing more, nothing less... and it was all the better for it.

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Match of the Day Soccer Annual 1979

Mike Channon’s favourite edition of Match of the Day was the one shown on the evening after the 1976 FA Cup Final. He was busy celebrating with his Southampton team-mates but, said Channon, “I cheated a bit and asked a friend to record both the match and the programme in the evening on a video tape recording machine I had just acquired.”

This, friends, was 1978, an era when VCRs were as rare as the hairs on Bruce Forsythe’s head, yet Mick Channon wasn't the only player to watch his favourite MOTD on tape. Colin Lee did likewise in 1977 after Tottenham’s 9-0 win over Bristol Rovers - a match in which Lee scored four:

“I can’t remember a great deal about the game itself, although a supporter taped Match of the Day and gave it me as a souvenir. I don’t have a recording machine myself, but I have a friend who has one and we've watched it a couple of times. It’s unbelievable.”

Ah, did we ever live in a world where VCRs were considered ‘new-fangled technology’...?

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England XI v Thames TV XI advert, 1979

While some people these days prefer to idle away their spare time pondering who they'd invite to their fantasy dinner parties, we football fans of a certain age can opt for something more enlightening. What better, you might say, than to put together your fantasy celebrity football team? Not much, we hear you cry.

Imagine, if you will, those heady days of the 1970's when a Pro-Celebrity Charity football match seemed to take place somewhere in the UK every other week. You could barely move for celebrity teams back then. TV commentators, politicians... everyone was at it. Rest assured the great, the good and the attention-seeking were all to be found pulling on a cheap Bukta strip at a neglected local football ground throughout the 70's, and to prove a point, here's an ad from surely the decade's biggest event.

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NASL Soccer (1979)

There is, in my view, a curious ratio that applies when you’re a child. It states that no matter how good the Christmas presents are that you receive, you will always be envious of those your friends received. This was the case back in the early 1980’s when I, as the grateful owner of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, paid a visit to the home of my schoolmate, Trevor. At some point in my stay, he unveiled the prize offering from his festive haul – an Intellivision video game system. No contest.

The Atari 2600 console seemed to have been and gone by the time Intellivision arrived in the UK. Intellivision seemed incredibly modern and comprehensive by comparison. True, we still had a token piece of wood panelling to provide a supposed touch of class, but the Mattel-made system had strange hand-held controllers like telephone handsets connected to their mothership via a curly cord. Strange stuff indeed.

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Panini: Football 79

Having cracked the UK market the previous year, Figurine Panini returned with a new sticker collection – Football 79 – to further establish itself as the leader in its field.

The album's royal blue cover featured an action shot of Liverpool playing Club Brugge in the 1978 European Cup Final, but rather cleverly the designers also added a few well chosen stickers to make the collection even more appealing to young kids.

Inside once again was the trusty fixture grid into which scores could be written, but that was small fry compared to the first main feature of the album – a 6-part map showing the locations of all the league teams of England, Scotland and Wales. The map proved so popular that it returned the following year in Panini's Europa 80 album.

The stickers of the Football 79 collection were more rectangular compared to Football 78, but once again there were 17 of them for each team – 15 players, plus a badge and a team picture on every double page spread. The player stickers had a less cluttered look than before with each player name displayed simply at the bottom while a small pictogram featured just above it to indicate the team name, colours and badge.

The main talking point for Football 79, however, wasn't the player stickers but the team badges. For the first and so far only time in Panini's rich history of sticker production in the UK, team badge stickers were made from fabric rather than metallic foil. The fabric itself had a silky texture and a silvery sheen which was a masterstroke of design and added a tactile element to an otherwise papery norm.

Quite why these silky silver badges never returned in subsequent years is unclear, but one can only assume Panini (and the collectors of its stickers) favoured the shiny foils in far greater numbers. A shame as this was an example of great originality on the part of the Italian manufacturer.

The page layouts were much neater for this second domestic collection and a preference for showing the player biographies below the stickers was established in this album. Sticker spaces were decorated on either side by a column of red globe symbols while the text (including the team profiles) appeared in blue. For the Scottish League Premier Division, all the teams were given equal prominence at last although the club badges featured a green background rather than the silver one favoured by their English counterparts.

For the English Second Division, the same format was used as for Football 78. Each club had a badge and team picture – both in landscape aspect this time – with the badges sporting a gold background and a football symbol to the right of each one. The usual array of facts and figures for each team was on show, printed in blue throughout and accompanied again by a fixture grid.

Among the inevitable array of curiosities found within the Football 79 album are a youthful looking Sam Allardyce sporting the sort of moustache that no 25-year-old should ever have, Chelsea's Clive Walker sporting the frizzy blond hair and black beard combo that no-one should ever have and QPR goalkeeper Phil Parkes sporting the shaggy dog look that frankly no shaggy dog should ever have. All that, and the first sight of shirt sponsorship courtesy of Hibernian's affiliation with Bukta. Something for everyone, then, in this excellent Panini sticker album.

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Subbuteo World (Catalogue I), 1979

For just ten of your British pennies, this catalogue could have been yours in the late 1970's, a small price to pay for the unfettered joy that lay within. Twenty-four half-size pages filled with every possible football team, accessory and Subbuteo set was displayed in full colour and capable of generating so much excitement in the juvenile mind that there barely seemed any point in buying the stuff at all.

I say that because this was a doorway into the realms of fantasy that any young football fan would have genuinely relished. Inside we get The Subbuteo Story, a history of the table soccer game in three paragraphs that reminded the reader how this simple pastime had grown and grown over more than three decades.

There was How to play Subbuteo, a worthwhile précis for the newcomer that basically says 'flick the players to move the ball to score goals.' Well you never know – this could have been read by a girl, conceivably.

We see six different Subbuteo Soccer sets available to purchase, each with a differing array of components and each aimed at a variety of budgets. Whether you wanted a basic Display Edition (teams, balls, goals but no pitch) or the full Stadium Edition (containing teams, a pitch, balls, floodlights, ball boys, a scoreboard and a section of grandstand), you couldn't help but let your mind boggle at the choice on offer.

But all of that was nothing compared to the main feature of this catalogue and many others (to say nothing of wallcharts) – the six pages featuring 322 Subbuteo teams in all their myriad colours and patterns. How many hours must have been lost by the thousands of kids gazing in wonderment at the regimented rows of vivid and bright figures before them. Some were familiar, others less so but they were never unfamiliar for long. A quick check of the 6-page index would quickly tell you that the team wearing red and white quartered shirts with red socks and shorts was actually the Italian club Rimini - a team you were never likely to buy but you wouldn't have left out of the catalogue for all the world.

At the back, there were pictures of all the things you could buy to personalise your Subbuteo collection beyond comprehension. Tournament goals, 'live action' goalkeepers (spring-loaded, of course), TV camera crews – hell, even the World Cup itself if you were prepared to squint a bit. And if football wasn't your thing, why not pay the 10p anyway and check out the Subbuteo Rugby and Cricket sets. The enormous cricket-bat-on-a-stick and the oversized ball seemed a little bit odd, but then, like rugby, cricket was for strange people anyway.

And that was that, except for one final note: this was the first of two near-identical Subbuteo catalogues produced in 1979. The other was released later in the year and was different in only one small detail – it had the Iran national football team in its listings. Never let it be said that Subbuteo didn't cater for all tastes.

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