Today I'm going back just 3 years to 11th August 2018 and the Scottish Championship game between Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Ayr United at the Caledonian Stadium in Scotland.
If you look closely at the image of the programme cover below and you are highly observant, you may notice that it looks a little different to the majority of programme covers that I've been posting recently. The rounded corners. The landscape cover. The lack of a price shown. The reason for all these oddities is that this programme was the first (for me anyway) of a new breed. An online only programme which I took the trouble to print out.
Football programmes have existed in England since the very beginnings of organised football more or less but, in recent times, the rise of the digital age has increasingly led people to question our attachment to paper when, in most other walks of life, documents are more likely to be electronic or digital. Young people are increasingly unused to handling paper documents and online programmes can carry videoclips and may be searchable which can be much easier to consume that large blocks of printed text. There are no physical storage issues with an online programme either. Inverness were the first club that I had come across where their programme was entirely online with no paper version being available but the global pandemic has seen a rapid increase in this phenomenon. Physical documents being handed across in exchange for notes and coins carry the risk of transmitting the virus you see?
In practice, many clubs at the non league level only produced a programme in the first place because they were obliged to under league rules. The advent of Covid19 has led a number of leagues to remove their requirement to produce a paper programme for each game and, in my view, clubs that stopped having to produce a paper programme won't want to go back to how it was. Programme Collectors are, therefore, potentially a dying breed. Certainly, whenever I attend the annual International Football Programme Fair in London, the age profile of the collector looks to be between 50 and 70. On that basis, the next 30 years may see the end of the hobby and of paper programmes altogether. Who will want a football programme collection when an old collector dies and their family is faced with the need to dispose of tons and tons of paper? I know that at York City, the club often receive offers to take an old collection free of charge but they simply don't have the time or the space to deal with a small mountain of paper. Sadly I imagine that many such collections end up in a skip.
Shannon's interest in her family heritage took us to Inverness and it was too good an opportunity for me to miss visiting one of the far flung outposts of British football. I was not to be disappointed by the stadium either, nestled as it was on the banks of the Moray Firth and at the foot of the Kessock Bridge. A beautiful spot indeed! As seems to be usually the case for me when it comes to matches in Scotland, the match itself left a lot to be desired. It finished goalless in front of a sparse attendance of only 2,376. I didn't see four and twenty virgins either! Perhaps they were all online too?
CRB Match No. 2236
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