Articles, Reviews & Product Reports at enort.com

In general you find four different types of collectors within the football programme world.

There is the potential collector who has a passing interest in beginning a programme collection, there is the latent collector who collects programmes infrequently, there is the casual collector who may collect football programmes without having a specific theme to their collection, and also there is the confirmed collector who has specific aims and regularly tries to purchase programmes in order to enhance his or her collection.

There is no exact size to a collection, with the only limitations to it come in the form of your available finance. To be a collector, there is no need to own highly collectible programmes, just simply something that brings pleasure or a sense of achievement to the collector. Football programme collectors come from all walks of life.

In the early stages of a collection, a collector may try to acquire everything they can find to their collection as quickly as possible in order to give it some bulk. However, with this comes a loss of tangible meaning, and later when restraints may mean a particular theme will have to be chosen and explored in order to further a collection.

There really are a limitless number of themes and sub-themes of programmes that can be collected. However, there are certain traditional ways of building a collection. For example, for example all those programmes concerned with a particular team, all those concerned with a specific competition, etc.

During the course of a collection a person is likely to discover the joys and pitfalls of buying a sought after old football programme, or the frustration of not being able to find a source for one that is vital to your collection.

Those casual collectors will usually own a limited number of important programmes for cup finals or semi-finals for the team that they personally support, internationals, testimonials, special fixtures, or other major cup matches. These can basically be classified as a Big Match programme.

If you have a big affection for a particular soccer club your mission in programme collecting may be to simply buy all issues for your favourite team. In addition to the normal league and cup matches, you may also try to collect programmes from friendlies, foreign tours, reserve teams, and youth teams.

One way of increasing the depth and scope of your collection is by setting an earlier date for the time period for which you’re collecting. You might, for example, decide to collect back to 1980, 1970, 1960, etc.

A collector who is fairly neutral in his or her affiliations, and just has a general passion for football will tend to widen the scope of their collection. In these sorts of collections you may find football programmes from a number of teams at different levels (including non-league).

For the more adventurous type of collector, football programmes may have been acquired from other countries.