In general you find four different types of collectors within the football programme enthusiast community. There is the potential collector who has a passing interest in starting a programme collection, there is the latent collector who collects programmes very sporadically, there is the casual collector who may accumulate football programmes without having a specific theme to their collection, and also there is the confirmed collector who has precise aims and regularly tries to buy programmes in order to enhance his or her collection.

There is no exact size to a collection, and the only limitations to it come in the form of your available funding. To be a collector, there is no need to own highly expensive programmes, just simply something that brings pleasure or a sense of satisfaction to the collector. Football programme collectors come from all sorts of backgrounds.

When they first start collecting, a collector may try to acquire everything on offer to their collection as quickly as possible in order to give it some bulk. However, with this comes a loss of focus, and later when restraints may mean a particular theme has to be selected and explored in order to enhance a collection.

There truly are a limitless number of themes and sub-themes of programmes that can be collected. However, there are a number of traditional ways of building a collection. For example, for example all those programmes involving a particular club, all those concerned with a specific competition, etc. Whilst collecting a person is likely to discover the highs and lows of acquiring a sought after football programme, or the frustration of not being able to find a source for one that is vital to your collection.

Those collectors who are more causal in their approach to the collecting of football programmes will usually own a limited number of important programmes for major finals or semi-finals for the team that they personally follow, internationals, testimonials, special fixtures, or other big cup ties. These can basically be classed as a Big Match programme.

If you have a big affiliation to a particular football club your mission in programme collecting may be to simply buy all issues for your chosen team. In addition to the normal league and cup matches, you may also attempt 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 1970, 1960, 1950, 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 often find football programmes from a range of clubs at different levels (including non league). For the more adventurous type of collector, football programmes may have been bought from other countries.

Chris Rudolph is a football programme collector and dealer. He runs the programme collector website.

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