A Soccer Obsession: Subbuteo
My wife thinks I’m a little crazy. My Dad wants to know why obscure packages from UK sellers on eBay land on his doorstep from time to time addressed to me, even though I live three thousand miles away. I concede that my collection of a game I first played as a soccer-obsessed youngster in England in the 1970s might suggest I am indeed a little eccentric. But, by the same token, there’s a sub-culture of people out there — numbering in the hundreds of thousands — who will appreciate my obsession completely. They understand.
It’s called Subbuteo. You can keep your high-tech EA Sports FIFA online tournaments. Nothing will ever rival the ability to ‘flick to kick’ with the world of your favorite sport and players literally at your fingertips.
I’ve played against a Subbuteo world champion and even tracked him down many years later (not as a stalker, but arguably close). I’ve witnessed the fire service called to intervene in a Subbuteo-related blaze, which generated a front-page newspaper headline. I transported a burgeoning collection across the Atlantic when I moved to the United States. These are the tales of my love-affair with a group of men who stand only an inch tall.
If you have no idea what I’m on about, invented in the 1940s by P.A. Adolph, Subbuteo was my generation’s equivalent of today’s EA Sports phenomenon back in the days before video game consuls and online interaction. Its simplicity and ability to mimic the real-life game of football (or soccer, as Subbuteo chose to describe its product) was its genius. There was a pitch, 11 players per side and that simple ‘flick to kick’ playing method that anybody could master.
In the words of a vintage Subbuteo catalogue from the 1960s from my collection: ‘As in real soccer the skill of the game is in the feet of the footballers — so in Subbuteo the skill of the game is in the finger tip control of the players.’
My romance began around the time of the 1974 FIFA World Cup when my Dad bought my brother Dave and I the Subbuteo basics: a red and white team, a blue and white team, two goals with nets, and a ball. The pitch, or playing surface was not considered a necessity until we were caught searching for white paint that we planned to use to add pitch markings to the green carpet in the dining room. A quick visit to Eric Willmonts Sporting Goods Store in our suburb of Birmingham saved the carpet. From that moment on, every penny of our pocket money was used to buy Subbuteo accessories. Grandstands, terracing, a TV tower, scoreboards, fence surrounds, ball boys, spectators, floodlights, corner flags, even a figure depicting Her Majesty the Queen presenting a trophy — we bought it all. (And I’ve replaced the pieces I lost over the years through those eBay purchases that arrive randomly on Dad’s doorstep.)
The World Champion
One Saturday morning, we visited Lewis’s department store in Birmingham city centre, where Subbuteo junior world champion Andrea Piccaluga from Italy was to perform an exhibition and show off some of the skills that made him the world’s greatest player. His index finger with which he flicked was insured for an insurmountable sum and his nail was manicured and grown longer than the others on his hand to enhance his skill level. He was a kid superstar. Playing with a team unusually wearing black kits, he obliterated all-comers. A long line of challengers received three minutes to create an upset. I remember conceding a seventh goal, perhaps even a ninth during my 180 seconds. The kid who pushed him the closest I recall managed to score a goal, though that just seemed to antagonize Andrea, who mercilessly also thrashed my brother.
Fast forward perhaps 35 years when for some unknown reason, I decided to discover what had become of Andrea. I imagined needing to trawl through censuses and documents with the aid of an Italian translator, creating a story shrouded in mystery, but no. It was much simpler than that as the internet had all the answers. One quick search produced a twitter account and there he was: Director of the Institute of Management at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna; Vice-President of Netval; member of the board at Fondazione Casa Cardinale Maffi Onlus. He’d done alright for himself!
I messaged Andrea through twitter, relaying my memory of his destruction of Birmingham’s finest Subbuteo wannabee challengers and included the photo of my brother playing against him at Lewis’s, with me looking on. He replied, we exchanged a few messages and then I let him go as surely, he could be playing Subbuteo in his spare time, rather than chat with me.
More recently, when Italy became the first European nation truly gripped by Covid-19, I checked in on the champ, concerned for his wellbeing. Judging by a recent post, he’s doing just fine and hasn’t forgotten his roots either.
Flickering the Flame
During my time as sports editor of the Lichfield Post newspaper in the mid-nineties, I received a press release from the city’s Subbuteo league. I was delighted to discover that despite the game’s popularity having waned among the mainstream kids, there was still a hardcore element keeping it alive. I agreed to feature news from their competition, which seemed to be dominated by the organizer Tom and his son and his wife too, within the sports pages. Tom, who had represented England at Subbuteo, was adamant that the league’s tournaments should rival the local football, rugby and cricket teams when it came to back page headlines, but I wasn’t so sure. I loved Subbuteo, but it was a game, surely, not a sport.
Instead, Tom, a local firefighter, inadvertently made the front page of the Post and created his own headline. He accidentally set his kitchen on fire while holding a Subbuteo player over the stove to heat its base, apparently using a method that improves performance. His own fire crew came rushing to his aid, sirens blaring and for my editor that was reason enough to give Tom the Subbuteo headline he craved and a tabloid-style story to match. Sadly, I didn’t save the clipping for my Subbuteo collection.
My wife tolerates my hoarding of Subbuteo, provided it remains within the confines of my home office. Ironically, she works for Hasbro, the toy company that holds the license for Subbuteo (no, that’s not why I married her). Production of Subbuteo ceased in 2000, prompting Tom Taylor’s wife Sue to tell the Guardian newspaper: “It is a great disappointment. It is the one make of table football equipment that everybody knows about and up until recently has been readily available in shops. It will obviously make it more difficult for youngsters coming into the game.”
I now live within spitting distance of Hasbro’s headquarters and I wonder if somewhere within their vault of old toys and games, sits some of the original table soccer teams and accessories, a Subbuteo holy grail of sorts. I suspect we will never know.
