The Coventry mum who’s spent 40 years making football mascots

The first things you notice when you walk into Angela Hallam’s home are a burger made out of styrofoam and a framed photo of a bulldog mascot above the fireplace.

When we meet the 71-year-old in her living room, she is sat on her red sofa, looking through a scrapbook filled with memories of almost 40 years spent designing and making football mascots.

Her long history of working with clubs across the country starts in Coventry in 1987 where Hallam, who had built a career designing fancy dress costumes for shops, was asked to make a mascot for Wolverhampton Wanderers FC.

“The next thing I knew I was doing the first Wolfie – then I did the first Leicester City, Derby County, Aston Villa, Coventry City, Birmingham City [and] West Brom [mascots],” she said. “I was there first.”

After years of hooliganism dominating the game, football clubs in the late 1980s were looking to rebrand as family-friendly organisations.

Part of that, Hallam said, was bringing mascots to the UK in a bid to emulate American sports teams.