My Life in Subbuteo Team Numbers: Chapter 1

Subbuteo is the world-famous table football game (usually played on the floor by my generation), created by Peter Adolph in 1946, that dominated my childhood and which now, with a big social media and online presence, is enjoying a global renaissance among the over-thirties.

I was 5 when my older cousin got a set one Christmas. Right away, I knew what I wanted the following yuletide. My dad loved football but hated Subbuteo, fearful its big selling point of offering hundreds of team designs listed in its much-prized colourful catalogues under reference numbers would impact further on our cramped living conditions, never mind the cost. He embarked upon a doomed quest to get me away from the game, going as far as building his own alternative table football set to make me forget about Subbuteo.

This is a potted dark comic memoir of devastating and abrupt losses, peaks, colourful 00 scale nostalgia and of the links, some preternatural, others less so, between those Subbuteo numbers and pivotal moments of my life as they intersect and collide with one another, such as:

41 in Subbuteo team numbers is Liverpool, the team I’ve supported since I was 4. 41 was the door number of my family’s first south London bedsit.

48 in Subbuteo team numbers is Spain. My parents were Spanish. 48 was the door number of the second and final bedsit we lived in for 24 years.

19 in Subbuteo team numbers is Barcelona, my dad’s team. My parents were married for 19 stormy years.

I will lean heavily on Peter Upton’s brilliant Subbuteo website, which a simple search will bring up for you. This project will feature elements of the classic Subbuteo catalogue with an index featuring the Subbuteo teams listed alphabetically and their numerical connections to my memoir.

Each story will include reference numbers, chosen at random from the heavyweight range (my favourite) of Subbuteo figures that runs from ref. number 1 to 322, and images of the Subbuteo figures pertaining to those numbers and how those number link to my life.

The classic, long-sleeved Subbuteo Heavyweight figure was primarily produced from 1967 to 1980. It began appearing around 1967 and quickly replaced the earlier short-sleeved OO scale figure. It was then the standard Subbuteo footballer throughout the “boom” years of the late 1960s and the 1970s, until it was phased out around 1980 and 1981 by the new Lightweight figure.

This 1967-80 period is often referred to by collectors as the “Classic Heavyweight” era.

Remaining faithful to the Subbuteo catalogue, as with Subbuteo team numbers, where a single number can represent multiple teams, the same will apply to my memoir. For instance, the landlord at number 48 (Spain) was Polish (39, Poland). In later life, I was out in Bahrain (39) and almost got married out there.

As vast as my Subbuteo collection was until the age of 16, before it was given away (now there’s a story), many of the reference numbers I will be covering never made it into my collection.

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