For a short, joyful period of my life, Subbuteo was everything to me. If I wasn’t playing flick-to-kick matches with my best mates, I was building a collection of teams and accessories. In my opinion, nothing has ever beaten it for creating the captivating fantasy world that pre-teen football kids crave.
Among many delights, the annual thrill of picking up the latest Subbuteo poster or catalogue was particularly exciting. Every picture tormented me with the potential for owning a small scale replica of the League Cup, a clear plastic team bench with seated players in tracksuits or something equally as enticing. Yet for all that, the star of the show would always be the team strips, modestly illustrated and printed in row upon row of vivid colour.
I never kidded myself that one day I might own most of those teams. For one thing, a Subbuteo XI cost nearly three whole English Pounds Sterling back in the early 80s. That was serious financial outlay, especially for a child that never actually received any pocket money.
Secondly, I didn’t actually know who many of the teams listed in the index were. Kickers Offenbach? Cospicua St Georges FC, anyone? And who the hell were Frigg?
The last reason I didn’t expect to buy all those teams was that I didn’t need to. One overlooked aspect to Subbuteo was that its range was so vast, you literally had no option but to dream about the things you’d like to own, unless you happened to be enormously wealthy. Imagine having a team that wore blue shirts with two white diagonal parallel stripes? Or pink shirts with blue sleeve taping? Maybe one day you’d end up with that team that wears black and white checked shirts, whoever they were.
And therein lies the mystery and wonder of those old Subbuteo posters, but as I grew older I found myself wondering just how accurate those Subbuteo kits were. Some of them were meant to represent not just one team but several. Surely they didn’t all wear the same kit in real life?
Fast forward forty years and now the time has come to find out what the real kits were like (if the internet allows me). This series will take as its basis the Subbuteo poster of 1979, and in each post I’ll be comparing successive Subbuteo team kits in numerical order with the real ones that were worn by the designated teams on the poster. Essentially it’s just a glorified excuse to illustrate random kits from around the world and wallow in some Subbuteo-based nostalgia, but I don’t suppose anyone’s going to complain about that.
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