I found another gem in a charity shop recently.

Above is something I imagine your nan would have put in your Christmas stocking in 1978, if football was the only thing she knew for definite her grandson liked. 45 years after it was published, I was fascinated to see the sort of thing that made it into such a book and how it differs from today. Just as I had been with a 1964 edition of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly that I found last year.

Information about the Score annual is irritatingly scarce online. Its publisher, Fleetway, was also responsible for well known comics such as Tiger, Eagle, Roy of the Rovers and 2000 AD, with the name disappearing in 2002. It seems the football annual we are looking at originates from Score ‘n’ Roar, a short-lived weekly comic.

The 1979 edition is a mixture of black and white and colour pages, not uncommon for the time. The first few are full-page colour photographs of notable contemporary football players – the yellow and green of the Norwich City kit catches the eye here, with captain Martin Peters the focus. Peters had been part of the England World Cup winning squad in 1966 and, as the caption marvels at, was still playing top division football twelve years later. That, too, for the Canaries!

Another of the featured players is Trevor Francis. Francis sadly died last month aged 69, having spent much of his life carrying around the tag of “Britain’s first £1 million footballer”. That transfer, from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest, had not happened by the time this Score annual was published, however, so instead the caption talks about him as a potential star for England at the 1982 World Cup. Francis was picked for that tournament, scoring against Czechoslovakia and Kuwait, but England were knocked out due to goalless draws with Spain and West Germany. He scored the winning goal in the 1979 European Cup final for Nottingham Forest, played for ten clubs, managed four, and later forged a career as a co-commentator with Sky Sports. A life well lived. May he rest in peace.

The transfer fees in the game of football these days are, quite frankly, ridiculous. Seven of the twenty most expensive deals in the sport’s history have happened in 2023 alone, and all of them in the last 14 years. A club spending £100 million on a single player is becoming increasingly common.

It raised a smile, then, when I read this article about goalkeepers in the annual. The caption under Peter Shilton’s right leg says he is demonstrating “just why he’s worth more than £300,000”. Adjusted for inflation, that would make Shilton – capped a record 125 times by England and a two-time European Cup winner – valued at just over £1.5 million. That would only get you a half decent third division player these days.

The 1970s may have been a time when what we would perhaps call ‘old fashioned’ views were prevalent. It’s important to say that the Score annual from 1978 is neither racist nor sexist, however. Some of the content does feel a little clunky to modern eyes but, as you can see, it does try to celebrate the black players who were around. It just does it in a way that kind of feels like they are animals in a zoo.

The double page spread features Laurie Cunningham, Viv Anderson, Vince Hilaire, John Chiedozie, Phil Walker, Trevor Lee, Cyrille Regis and Ricky Hill. It refers to these players as “coloured” throughout. It is hard to imagine such a feature ever being given the green light these days – thankfully.

Brian Clough is surely one of the most famous football managers of all time. Admired and despised, depending on your view, for his witty comments to the press (“I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one”) and apparent arrogance, Clough won league titles with both of the fierce East Midlands rivals Derby County and Nottingham Forest – the road linking the two cities is called Brian Clough Way. The story of his 44-day stint as manager of Leeds was told in the book and the film The Damned United, in which he was portrayed by Michael Sheen. A familiar sight on the touchline in his trademark green jumper, as statue of him stands proudly in the centre of Nottingham. Clough died in 2004.

The feature in the Score annual focuses on Clough being the joint-manager of the England Youth team. Little did the writer know, Clough would soon achieve something that would leave a far greater legacy. He guided Nottingham Forest, astonishingly, to back-to-back European Cup triumphs in 1979 and 1980.

As I type this, it is the afternoon of the day the England women’s team beat Australia in the World Cup semi-final to reach their first final. This comes just over a year after they were crowned European champions at Wembley. The match was watched by 75,000 people in the stadium in Sydney and by millions of television viewers on BBC One. Women’s football, and women’s sport in general, has never been more popular.

It was quite an eye-opener, then, to see a feature in the Score annual with the title “Is it a girl’s game?”. It describes football as “one of the fastest-growing women’s sports” (they had no idea how far they had to go!) and says “already there are women’s teams in leagues up and down the country – and even international matches”. There is a slightly patronising tone to the “even” that gets me in that sentence.

It’s not a big feature. That block of text is accompanied by only four photos, depicting the English, Swedish, French and Italian women’s teams. The France side are only shown in the dressing room, and the Italy squad at Heathrow airport, but the match action is between England and Sweden. A bit of digging reveals that this is likely to have been the friendly between the two nations at Plough Lane in Wimbledon in 1975. Sweden won 3-1. It is interesting to see a small but interested crowd in the background, with plenty of men in attendance.

The final thing I’ve picked out from the Score annual of 1979 is this feature on the rising popularity of football in the USA. Aside from claiming that the Americans refer to fans as “fannies” (really?), it explains the slightly different rules used in the North American Soccer League. A line was drawn on the pitch, 35 yards from goal, and a player could only be offside if he was goal side of it. That’s not a bad idea actually…

The concept of a draw was, and in some ways still is, hard for Americans to get their heads around, so matches in the NASL determined a winner with a shootout. But not a penalty shootout. The ball was placed on that 35 yard offside line and the player had 10 seconds to score. Essentially a one-on-one situation, the player could dribble as far as he liked towards the goal and the keeper could come as far off his line as he wished. That sounds fairer than a penalty shootout, doesn’t it? A truer reflection of the players’ skills? Maybe the Americans had it right as far back as 1978.

Searching on YouTube, it seems these shootouts remained a part of the game for several years. One video shows San Jose Clash against Chicago Fire from July 1999, where the only thing that’s changed from the 1978 rules is the player now has only 5 seconds to score.

Teams in the NASL were awarded a whopping 6 points for a win, three times what you’d get in the English leagues in 1978. You would also get an extra point for every goal up to three, so a 3-0 win would see you add 9 points to the table. The losing side would also get a point for each goal scored up to three, so an agonising 4-3 defeat would still see you pick up 3 points. Quite a neat way to encourage attacking football really.

Phil Woosnam, a former Wales international, was the Commissioner (the boss) of the NASL in 1978 and is quoted as saying “America would like to stage the World Cup Finals and the national team is looking to make an impact in the tournament”. This dream would, of course, be realised in 1994 when the USA hosted the World Cup and the final was played in front of 94,000 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. The national team has not gone beyond the quarter finals since 1930, however. They will hope to do better in 2026, when they will once again host the World Cup, alongside Canada and Mexico.

The feature excitedly tells us that “some grounds have action-replay screens, where supporters can see a goal again in slow motion seconds after it’s been scored”. A novel idea in 1978, now commonplace in just about every top level football ground in the world. Norwich’s Carrow Road has a screen that rotates!

Score credits the great Pele for sparking football to life in the US, with his three years at New York Cosmos. It mentions “there are moves to expand the League”, which of course they did with Major League Soccer (MLS) in 1996, and now the world’s greatest player – Lionel Messi – turns out for Inter Miami, a team founded by David Beckham. Fair to say the writers in 1978 were right about the potential for the game in the States. The annual comes across as slightly worried about the prospect of players in the English leagues being tempted to go to the US – an eerily similar situation to the one we have now with Saudi Arabian clubs paying colossal sums of money for Premier League stars.

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If you’ve made it this far, thank you very much for reading, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip back into days gone by.