Matchday programme
A matchday programme or match programme is a booklet associated with a live sporting event which details the proposed starting lineup and other details of the match. To some spectators, the purchase of a matchday programme is part of the "ritual" of attending football and hurling matches in Britain and Ireland. Until 2018, the printing of matchday programmes was compulsory for English Football League games. Souvenir programmes are also collected as sports memorabilia, and rare FA Cup Final matchday programmes have fetched in excess of £35,000 at auction houses such as Sotheby's. Matchday programmes from early 20th-century hurling and Gaelic football games are also collected in Ireland, and a programme from the 1913 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final was sold at auction in 2018 for more than €2,000. Association football A tradition from attending a football match in Britain is to purchase a football programme along with a pint and/or a pie. Due to their initial expendable nature (like the ticket) it took many decades for the format to gain respectability as a collectible. Collecting football programmes became a common hobby among fans in Britain during the 1960s and from then on a number of specialist dealers began to appear. Merseyside team Everton were the first association football club in Britain to produce regular matchday programmes. History The programme started life around the late 1880s as a scorecard which would have been a single card or sheet with dateline, team names and player positions. West Midlands team Aston Villa were one of the first clubs to publish a programme with their The Villa News and Record, which from the outset almost encouraged collecting as it was in the form of a journal with a different number and volume for each season and week respectively; by 1946, for instance, it was up to number 33. Of real interest for the collector, however, has always been the FA Cup Final programme; over the years there have been many attractive covers and the design often reflecting the age, with the late 1920s and 1930s examples bearing Art Deco style, for example. Programmes from the 1940s and early 1950s are rarer due to recycling for paper shortages as part of the war effort and times of post-war austerity. The size of the programmes increased over the decades from a smaller pocket size to a larger A4 size, but a number of clubs in the early 21st century have reverted to more convenient sizes. The FA Cup Final has, however, retained its larger size (even acknowledging this by coming with a customary carrier bag in recent years). Modern programmes have far more pages than their earlier four or eight-page predecessors and are generally full colour and glossy. With the logistics and requirements of modern production (programmes are often printed beyond a club's locality, for example), the product has long been of little help in accuracy of the "field of play", although the advent of squad numbers has at least ensured the likelihood of all names