Above : A ten-item mixed lot , £ 60-100 [ Bamfords Ltd .] Below : A 25 item mixed lot , also £ 60-100 [ Bamfords Ltd .]
Above : The match I didn ’ t see : Derby County versus Crystal Palace , two days before Christmas 1967 . [ Private collection ]
Above right : Typical Crystal Palace programme from the mid-1950s . [ Private collection ]
Right : Match card : Everton vs Derby County 1890 [ Private collection ]
made them octavo , or even ‘ pocket ’ sized , but increasingly embellished with photographs , and this continued during the following decade with increasing amounts of colour and arresting designs appearing in the 1970s , when printing firms often produced programmes for a number of teams , although this era also ushered in great fluctuations in size .
From the 1990s there has been a gradual expansion of content and the introduction of glossy finishes , producing something much closer to souvenir standard , and of course the more durable for it . Today they are almost all A4 sized and often 48 / 96 pages long .
The older the programme , the higher will be its value , but scarcity introduces an element of uncertainty . Generally speaking programmes from before the 1970s are worth more than those dating from later , where £ 1.50- £ 5 is the norm . In the more recent era , it is postponed matches and replays which can increase the price , whilst programmes from the 1940s tend to command prices of £ 10 or more , with from £ 30 to near £ 100 being the norm for the preceding two decades .
Cup finals , of course are much more sought after , testimonial matches honouring retiring players of real stature and first matches under notable managers , also add a premium . For instance the match I attended at Derby was a very early Clough / Taylor one , a fact of which I was , of course , blissfully ignorant . A programme for the 1882 FA Cup Final made £ 35,250 at auction four years ago , whilst the previous highest price ( Spurs v Sheffield United 1901 FA Cup final at Crystal Palace ) was £ 14,400 and the Cup Final programme for 1924 made £ 6,500 . For the Derby County supporter the real nirvana is the 1946 cup-final programme ( Derby beat Charlton Athletic 4-1 in extra time by the way ). This was the first after the war , making it collectible for a constituency well outside Rams fans , and the only final ever contested by Derby . A clean example might cost you
( judging by more recent auction results ) between £ 175 and £ 240 .
Football programmes are fairly easy to store ( although modern ones take up an obscene amount of shelf-space compared to pre-1990s ones ) and if one sticks to post-1950 examples , on the whole it is an inexpensive hobby , apart from misprints , typos and other defects as-sold , which tend to add to the price .
Oh , and if you had a past member of the family fairly wedded to spending Saturday afternoons getting pneumonia at the local football ground , search the loft : there might conceivably be a dusty old box of old programmes waiting to be liberated onto the market !
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