About collecting football programmes
In general you find a few different types of collectors within the football programme world. There is the potential collector who has a passing interest in starting a programme collection, there is the latent collector who collects programmes very sporadically, there is the casual collector who may collect football programmes without having a specific theme to their collection, and also there is the confirmed collector who has distinct aims and regularly tries to buy programmes in order to enhance his or her collection.
There is no exact size to a collection, with the only limitations to it come in the form of your available funding. To be a collector, there is no need to own highly collectible programmes, just simply something that brings enjoyment or a sense of achievement to the collector. Football programme collectors come from all sorts of backgrounds.
When they first start collecting, a collector may try to add everything on offer to their collection as quickly as possible in order to give it some bulk. However, with this comes a loss of focus, and later when restraints may mean a particular theme has to be selected and explored in order to further a collection.
There truly are a limitless number of themes and sub-themes of programmes that can be collected. However, there are certain traditional ways to build a collection. For example, for example all those programmes concerned with a particular team, all those played in a specific competition, etc. During the course of a collection a person is likely to discover the joys and pitfalls of buying a sought after football programme, or the frustration of not being able to find a source for one that is key to your collection.
Those collectors who are more causal in their approach to the collecting of football programmes will usually own a small number of important programmes for cup finals or semi-finals for the team that they personally support, internationals, testimonials, special fixtures, or other big cup ties. These can basically be classed as a Big Match programme.
If you have a strong affection for a particular football club your mission in programme collecting may be to simply acquire all editions for your chosen team. In addition to the regular league matches and cup-ties, you may also be tempted to collect programmes from friendlies, foreign tours, reserve teams, and youth teams.
One way of increasing the depth and scope of your collection is by setting an earlier date for the time period for which you’re collecting. You could, for example, decide to collect back to 1970, 1960, 1950, etc.
A collector who is fairly neutral in their affiliations, and just has a general passion for football will tend to widen the scope of their collection. In these sorts of collections you may find football programmes from a number of teams at varying levels (including non-league). For the more adventurous collector, football programmes may have been bought from other countries.
Chris Rudolph is a football programme collector and dealer. He runs the programme collector website.
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