Lichfield memorabilia seller fears football programme market doomed

Football memorabilia shop owner John Morris estimates he has about half a million match programmes in storage, some dating back to the 1950s.

But as teams kick off their Championship season this weekend, the Staffordshire retailer says times have changed, with around a third of clubs in the English Football League no longer printing them.

“Well, they certainly have a place, but since we’ve been open, which is two years now, the number of programmes we actually stock in the shop has gone down,” Mr Morris told BBC Radio WM.

“People no longer come in at the regularity that they used to, looking with their lists of the programmes they need to complete [the] set.”

As a Wolves fan, Mr Morris’s favourite programme is from the 1980 League Cup final, when his team beat Nottingham Forest.

But he and business partner Paul Hill have “loads of Aston Villa programmes”, as where the shop is based, in Lichfield, “we’ve got about 90% Aston Villa fans”.

There is also an added sprinkling of stardust in the shape of Dennis Mortimer who, as captain, led Villa to victory in the 1982 European Cup final, beating Bayern Munich 1-0.

Mr Morris says the retired player comes in every week and the shop sells items from his personal collection.

However, because the shop has “so many [programmes] to get rid of”, they have bundled them up, typically selling 10 for about £2.50.

“So the value of programmes has also come down quite a lot over the last few years,” Mr Morris said.

Fans of other West Midlands clubs also went into the shop and typically customers looking to complete a set had collected for most of their lives, he said.

They had programmes from perhaps their first game in the 1950s or 1960s and “they’ve collected the programmes from every match from that time”.

Mr Morris said he thought it was a “generational thing that’s making the change”.

He wished he could answer the question about whether people would still talk about the programmes in the next 10 or 20 years, he said.

“My personal view is I don’t think we will,” Mr Morris said.

“You mentioned about the digital age. I think that programmes may have had their day now.

“There’s a very big collectable [item] market within football, don’t get me wrong. But now younger people collect football cards.

“The variety that you can get with the autographs on….. and all the different variations of the cards, these have really captured the children’s [imagination] and the chaps like in [their] 20s and 30s.”