page_title: Matchday programme
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Matchday programme / Association football / History
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Program z meczu Queens Park FC - Wanderers FC z 1875 roku
context_page_description: The purchase of a matchday programme has long been part of the "ritual" of attending football and hurling matches in Britain and Ireland.
  It is now quite common for a 1920s FA Cup Final programme to fetch in excess of £1000 at auction houses such as Sotheby's or Bonhams, with said sale receiving national press coverage in Britain.
  A matchday programme from the 1913 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final sold at auction in Kilkenny for more than €2,000 in 2018.
context_section_description: 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.  
  It is understood that pre-war and early 1950s programmes are rarer due to recycling for paper shortages as part of the war effort and times of post-war austerity. The size of the programme has increased over the decades from the convenient pocket size to A4 but many clubs in the early 21st century have reverted to a more convenient size. The FA Cup Final has, however, retained its inconvenient 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 being present. The programme for Duncan Edwards's debut for North West team Manchester United in the early 1950s for example does not bear his name at all.
  In June 2018, clubs in the English Football League voted to end the requirement for programmes to be produced for every game.
caption: Programme for an association football match played at Hampden Park, Glasgow on 9 October 1875 between home side Queen's Park and the Wanderers from London. It mentions the visiting club first and identifies individual players not by jersey numbers but by the colours of their stockings or caps.
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