123: Crystal Palace, Merlin’s Premier League 95 Sticker Collection and 57-58: Blackburn Rovers, Merlin’s Premier League 97 Official Sticker Collection

The first football team photo is believed to be one of a Sheffield representative eleven taken ahead of an exhibition match against a similarly cobbled together side from Birmingham in 1875. The picture was part of a wider publicity campaign for the fundraising event in aid of the fantastically named Sheffield Football Players Accident Society and featured in The Sheffield Portrait Gallery, a journal of literature, criticism and satire apparently, ahead of the game. The appropriately moustachioed and capped gentlemen of Sheffield ran out 6-0 winners and perhaps it was their sporting prowess that attracted two rather smart looking ladies to sneak into the photograph with them. Hopefully there weren’t any subsequent disagreements between the two forcing a Mrs Constance Rooney to launch a campaign of explosive journalism in the Yorkshire Post against her former companion Lady Rosemary Vardy.

The team photo became a huge part of football culture with sides using them as a vehicle for a variety of causes from celebrating significant achievements to revealing a snazzy new away kit. As a result they have been a fixture of sticker albums through the ages and have provided some lovely anomalies such as Merlin’s decision to immortalise Barnsley’s 1997/98 youth team and the Panini album for the 2018 World Cup sneaking in an image of Jack Butland despite reserving the traditional headshots for Jordan Pickford and Joe Hart. Whilst such images remain a mainstay of international football their presence in modern club football seems to be in decline. In some ways you can see why. Is there a wide enough lens to capture a squad like Manchester City’s or Liverpool’s which, based on squad numbers alone, seem to have over 80 members? Is your reserve goalkeeping coach the best advert for your third kit when there are some moody looking Instagram models willing to don it in a skatepark in Catford? Is there much point gathering the entire squad together when you’re sending most of them off to Vitesse Arnhem on loan for the rest of the season?

In response to such questions I provide you with two examples for your consideration. I’ll admit the second sticker is more to try and convince some of our regular readers (and myself) that this isn’t just a Crystal Palace blog but there are some great things about it that I’ll come to in due course. Let’s start on a sunny afternoon in Selhurst Park in August 1994.

What I love about team photos from this period is how many angles you could approach them from. Football managers have become famous for their sartorial choices from Brian Clough’s goalkeeper jerseys to Jose Mourinho’s designer coats. Neither of these provide much comfort for the ‘deeply involved in training’ coach though so it’s good to see Alan Smith and his team decked out in a rather fetching full away kit long before Tony Pulis turned to wearing the clearance stock from the club shop of every side he steered away from relegation. It’s exactly this kind of picture that makes me wonder if John Terry has the full Aston Villa kit on under his trackies in case the Villans should need to lift any trophies. 

On the subject of trophies you get the impression that Palace want to make it clear to you that they are coming up to the Premier League as Division 1 champions. That’s a proper looking piece of silverware in fairness and you’ve got to give some credit to the Premier League for coming up with a decent enough bit of kit to challenge this beautiful old thing. No wonder the players have gone to the effort to check in with the barbers ahead of the big photoshoot and a special shout to youngsters Jamie Vincent and Tony Scully who followed first team stalwart Simon Rodger’s advice when it came to haircuts. On the subject of youngsters there’s Jimmy Glass next to Nigel Martyn back when he was earning his living as the perennial unused substitute keeper. Despite signing professional terms with the Eagles back in 1989 Glass never made a first team appearance for Palace but will always be remembered as the man who scored in the last minute to keep Carlisle United in the Football League back in 1999. Who doesn’t love a goalscoring keeper?

Despite this treasure trove of nostalgia my favourite thing about this sticker has to be the appearance of suited and booted club chairman Ron Noades. The role of the club chairman certainly developed in the 1990s and no one could begrudge Jack Walker joining his Blackburn Rovers squad on the Anfield turf to celebrate their title win in 1995. However, ‘Uncle Jack’ and the late Leicester City kingpin Vichai Srivaddhannaprabha aside, this isn’t particularly common behaviour for the money men behind Premier League success let alone those at the helm lower down the league. Apart from maybe Ron Noades. After all this was the man who had taken a massive dump over his early success at Palace by suggesting that the club needed white players to “give the team some brains and common sense” to balance the brilliance of the Eagles’ predominantly black forward line. Unsurprisingly this expedited the departure of Ian Wright, Mark Bright and Andy Gray and the club’s relegation in the inaugural Premier League season. Clearly he felt an instant return to the top flight made up for this. We won’t get started on his eventual sale of the club in 1998 which, as well as his brief spell as caretaker manager at the end of the awful 1997/98 campaign, landed the club in administration by the turn of the century. Thanks for all that Ron.

Before this descends into Palace related bitterness let’s fast-forward a couple of years to the Blackburn Rovers squad. There’s no sign of influential chairman Jack Walker but we do have one suited figure in Rovers’ manager Ray Harford. Two seasons earlier Harford would have been donning Blackburn’s excellent title-winning away kit as Kenny Dalglish’s assistant but the Scotsman’s promotion to Director of Football elevated him to the managerial seat ahead of the 1995/96 season. He led Rovers to a respectable seventh despite injuries to key players like Graeme Le Saux and Chris Sutton but the departure of Alan Shearer hit the club hard and, after no wins in the first ten games of the 1996/97 campaign, Harford handed in his resignation. As Dalglish was to find out himself at Newcastle United it’s never easy to take over another manager’s team and although Harford was a key component in Rovers’ 90s success he had always had reservations about taking the main job after similar experiences with Luton Town, Fulham and Wimbledon with Bobby Gould. He did at least come out with a cracking line when quizzed about the need to replace Shearer with a marquee signing: “I’m told we need a big name. Engelbert Humperdinck is a big name but it doesn’t mean he can play football.” Maybe ‘Release Me’ was actually about Engelbert’s inability to break into the Leicester City team as a lad.

We’ve already sung the praises of dressing your coaching staff in the club’s away kit but I feel Blackburn deserve extra marks for using this as an opportunity to reveal not just one but two snazzy new goalkeepers’ jerseys. We also get the first sight of a young Shay Given in the Bobby Mimms role for good measure or, as I prefer to remember him, at the point in his career where he turned his back on Premier League riches to join my Mansfield Town team on CM2. There’s a fair amount of this shameless advertising of keeper stash in the 1997 edition of the Premier League album but Blackburn had the good grace to just stick to the two keepers rather than dragging some poor lads out of the youth team to make the photo look better (we see you Arsenal) and at least the kit templates complimented each other. When I pitched this post to the rest of the Sticker 500 lads Rich sent me through a Grimsby Town team photo from 1988 where their poor keepers’ kits not only didn’t match up but were made by completely different manufacturers setting the trend for the keeper from one of my junior teams who insisted on wearing his Millwall kit over the flirty purple one that came with our orange and black striped ensemble.

When I try to justify this blog to myself as an extension of my history studies I think that these kind of stickers almost have the same depth as prominent microhistories such as David Olusoga’s ‘House Through Time’ or Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘The Cheese and The Worms’. There are so many stories that can be garnered from a single snapshot of some people who had little else in common besides they happened to play for the same football club at the same time. But when I’m honest it’s clear that this is just a way to unleash a barely connected selection of comments on some old sticker albums I haven’t had the heart or sense to part with.