Last weekend, the hundreds of thousands of supporters of the 72 football league teams filled the nation’s stadiums to witness the kick off of another season of the UK’s favourite sporting pastime. Tomorrow, they will be joined by thousands more, as the multimillion-pound juggernaut that is the Premier League gets underway. While much has changed for these supporters over the years, with the scale of football expanding and the culture of the game very different to how it once was, one thing has remained constant: nearly every person attending a game of football will have the beloved match-day programme stuffed into their back pocket.

While newspapers are being beaten to the news by websites, tube posters are turning into videos and birthday cards are turning into e-cards, football fans still seem to have a thirst for printed programmes. Whether it is the World Cup Final or a late-season mid-table clash in the Essex Senior League Division One, a large percentage of attendees who will buy a programme. But with the rise of ticket prices putting budgets under pressure and the increased competition from online channels, such as club websites and fan forums, how much longer can the printed football programme survive?

Football programmes first began to appear in the 1880s, at a time when football’s popularity was starting to rise.

The professional game was just around the corner, some players were already being paid, the FA Cup was in its infancy and by the end of the decade England would be the first country in the world to have a national football league. Then the power clubs of the day, led by "money bags" teams Aston Villa and Sunderland, gave out scorecards at matches. In Aston Villa’s case, this soon became The Villa News and Record, which it still produces today, which was offered in the form of a journal and volumed, adding to the collector feel.

Although programmes are still popular, things are getting more difficult. Match tickets can cost as much as £90 for some games, while the cost of season tickets is getting ever higher, with the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool upping prices by 6.5% for this season. With food costs inside the ground skyrocketing too, there’s not much left over for the football programme.

It’s a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that much of the essential match-day information – team sheets, player profiles, manager’s comment and other club-related information – can be relayed on the ever-present big screens or on club websites, rendering the programme more than a little redundant.

Escaping pressures
That said, according to Bishops Printers, which is responsible for the printing of programmes for clubs ranging from Arsenal and Chelsea, through to non-league sides, run lengths are relatively static. The company says paginations too have so far escaped the pressures facing other printed products, with no sign of programmes slimming down.

That’s not to say the clubs and publishers are resting on their laurels. There is a realisation that supporters need a compelling reason to buy and Bishops Printers managing director Gareth Roberts says that, for some, this has meant a shift to a more memorabilia-style product, rather than one that is purely practical.

"The main trend for the longer runs – so programmes for clubs like Chelsea or Arsenal – is a move towards perfect binding to give a more ‘souvenir’ brochure feel," he explains.

Perfect binding generally means stronger PUR glue that protects against the harsh elements such as rain, snow, icy-cold temperatures and, every now and then, blazing sunshine. By creating something that looks like it should be kept, clubs can appeal to the collector mentality.

However, Andrew Lane, owner of Football Sport Auctions which handles a lot of football programme memorabilia, explains that just making a football programme perfect bound is unlikely to make it a collectable item. 

"Collectors generally won’t look to buy anything beyond the 1980s," he says. "After this point the publications became mass produced and full of adverts. The charm of football programmes was lost and it has yet to be recovered."

Making the football product more memorable by increasing its tactile nature or visual appeal may have been a way around this but Bishops’ Roberts says that clubs don’t necessarily have the cash to invest in programmes, something Celloglas, which also works with many football clubs on their programmes, agrees with. 

Marketing manager Jennifer Deacon says: "We have laminated and coated programmes for clubs, but as of yet we haven’t been able to offer any special finishes. Gloss and matt lamination are used for protective, rather than decorative, purposes. When we talk to a lot of clubs about using specialist finishing techniques, they often say they don’t have any money in the budget for that kind of thing."

Shifting to a memorabilia-style product may not be the best option, then, but finding a different route to competing with the online world is tough. A spokesman for the Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) explains that communication between the club and supporters is not just a one-way street anymore; now you’ve got forums, fanzines and message boards that offer a much more dynamic way of interacting. Hence, the football programme purchaser is likely to be of the older generation.

"People in their 20s and 30s just don’t buy them anymore," he explains. "It’s the older, less internet-savvy supporter that tends to make a purchase now, the type that gets to the game early and pours over the pages. The younger generation get their information online in a much more interactive way and are less time-rich, so don’t tend to sit at the ground for hours before a game needing something to pass the time."

Survival strategies
If programmes are going to survive, they need to attract younger fans, and, as print is now firmly established as part of the cross-media mix, it should be well-placed to facilitate this process. Some clubs are already cottoning on to the new dynamic. Millwall, for example, issued a 3D programme for their game against Leeds last year, maintaining the £3 cover price.

The FA is similarly forward-looking. For the FA Cup Final it worked with Haymarket Network to produce a football programme that included video content. Thanks to the use of Haymarket Network’s QR code platform, readers were directed from print to online, via their mobile phones, where they could access a range of the FA’s video content.

 "The football programme remains massively strong and a huge part of the match-day experience," explains Haymarket Network director Cormac Bourne. "This is because it is developing to reflect the fact that there are so many more media and channels for clubs to interact with supporters and using the QR codes is a great way of facilitating that multichannel offering and ensuring the football programme is not a standalone product."

At present, however, these instances are few and far between as the once seemingly endless pot of money in football gets spread ever thinner. Also, some argue the football programmes are always one step behind the rapid development of online models and so print is really struggling to keep up and make itself relevant.

One course of thinking is that it should not try to compete. The nostalgia for football programmes is strong among supporters and the recent shift to vintage culture could present an opportunity. A shift to the old-style, thinner and more basic programmes, ones not filled with advertising, and which therefore have the "charm" Lane talked of, may be a realistic lifebelt in choppy waters.

However the problem is tackled, there is the reassurance that the printed football programme is still close to most supporters’ hearts.

"Even the generation that currently doesn’t buy football programmes would be really depressed if they ever disappeared completely and so that is something those producing the programmes could tap into," says the FSF spokesman. "They just have to find a way of making them buy."

That’s a dilemma that extends beyond football programmes and into the rest of print. Indeed, the fact that a print product as stable in run lengths and paginations as football programmes is under so much threat, just shows that there is no corner of the printing industry that is completely safe and that everyone has to work harder to prove print is worthy of its place at the table.

In the case of football programmes, whether that comes from shifting to retro styles, or embracing the multimedia future, or some other method that keeps them in the Premier League, remains to be seen, but like the league tables, we should have a clearer idea come the end of the season.