A Sticker's Worth 500 Words

In 1879 schoolmaster James Allan decided to gather his colleagues together for a kickabout and, by October 1880, Sunderland AFC had come into existence. Based on personal experience of teachers’ kickabouts I can only assume there were some ultra-competitive members of the PE department, some surprisingly decent elder statesmen and one member of the Senior Leadership Team who everyone was worried about tackling. Unlike the various Friday misuses of sports halls I have taken part in Sunderland joined the Football League in 1890 and had won the whole thing three times in their first five seasons. Long before Chelsea were given something shiny for a couple of minutes by Donald Trump the Black Cats had also been crowned ‘Football World Champions’ on three occasions by virtue of victories over Scottish champions Celtic, Queen’s Park and Heart of Midlothian. When the First World War brought a temporary pause to league football in 1915 Sunderland had won five league championships, finished a...

Emlyn Shepherdson-Jones heads north of the border to have a look back at the good old days when footballers had proper mullets and could do a job up front and at centre half . This post’s subject earned the nickname Braveheart partly due to his fearless performances for club and country but, more realistically, because he happened to be at his peak around the same time the film came out and had an excellent haircut. Over to Emlyn. For plenty of people, myself included, their love of football is formed in childhood, and the modern iteration doesn't hold quite the same charm as their first exposure to the beautiful game. I'm sure this was true for people from every era, with innovations from goalie gloves to coloured boots all being surefire signs that 'the game's gone'. For me, early memories of Eric Cantona bamboozling opponents, or the cultured play of Dennis Bergkamp or David Ginola coming up against the grit of Julian Dicks and Neil Ruddock , will always hold...

Coursework season has recently come to a close at work and it’s hard to tell who is more relieved. For students there is the catharsis of handing in a significant piece of work which has caused several sleepless nights while for teachers it means we can actually finish up the content for the upcoming public exams. The tight word count often leaves students needing to cut towards the deadline and my advice is always for them to read their work aloud as it often highlights repetition, typos and waffle. Despite the word limit for this particular blog being forgotten a long time ago I still ask my long suffering wife to listen to my posts before I upload them for the aforementioned reasons. She’s only fallen asleep a couple of times in the last six years. She did have a little chuckle for herself at the mention of Swiss side BSC Young Boys’ home ground, Stadion Wankdorf, last time out which led me to reference an American Football team my old man had mentioned having the nickname ‘the Wa...

EA Sports FC 26 was released in September 2025 and, by the end of the following month, had sold twelve million copies. The latest edition of the successor to the infamous FIFA series apparently included “a complete overhaul of dribbling mechanics”, “more lifelike goalkeeping animations ” and the ability to make your Career Mode starlets experience homesickness. I’m sure all of this is great but as someone who hasn’t played a football game released since 2008 it isn’t exactly making me want to remortgage and buy a PS5. FC 26 can boast incredible attention to detail, however, with more than 20,000 licensed players and a host of realistic stadia including Everton’s new offering and the, never not amusing, Stadion Wankdorf home of Swiss side BSC Young Boys. Graphically it also looks frighteningly realistic and a far cry from Chris Kamara ’s Street Soccer but probably doesn’t let you play in a medieval castle. Access to such licensing was not always a given for the franchise formally known...

Whether you love it or loathe it the tabloid press is an integral part of both British society and the beautiful game. While the decline of print media, and the Leveson Enquiry, has curbed its power its influence extends far beyond its dwindling readership and, perhaps, no more so than in its contribution to the English language. Robert Hutton’s excellent ‘Romps, Tots and Boffins…The Strange Language of News’ goes further to define the language of the press as a separate entity, known as ‘journalese’, where formal discussions are always “crisis talks”, large sums of money are routinely “trousered” and all award ceremonies are “glitzy”. In amongst these are the “bigwigs”, “chiefs” and “tsars” who dominate the worlds of law, business and the civil service, the “crooners” and “rockers” who make up the music industry and the “playboys”, “vice girls” and “love rats” held up for public disdain. Football (or, more often for the press, “soccer” or “footie”) has accordingly always provided a nu...

It’s amazing what a global pandemic, several boxes of old football stuff and Peter Fear ’s curtains can do but, 399 posts after an attempt to stay sane, here we all are. Throughout this time the UK has had four Prime Ministers, two monarchs and economic twists and turns that mean buying a Freddo now probably requires a mortgage. In the footballing world England’s men have reached two consecutive European Championship finals while the Lionesses have won two consecutive European Championships , Leicester City and Crystal Palace have won the FA Cup and Watford have had fifteen different managers . Plenty of other stuff has happened too and whether or not any of us here has remained sane is probably best put to our long suffering partners, children and friends. When live football was taken away from us its absence convinced the four of us that we really missed it. This ignores the fact that my attendance at Selhurst Park since Palace returned to the Premier League is worse even than m...