It has been a staple of Carlisle United games for generations – but the end is finally nigh for the matchday programme at Brunton Park.
Consistently declining sales figures, in line with increased online reading habits, means the Blues are likely to pull the plug on the printed programme at the close of this campaign.
Barring an unexpected leap in sales between now and May, 2022/23 will go down as the last season of the traditional matchday publication at United’s ground.
The impending decision will be made with a heavy heart, but also driven by the unavoidable business reality that buying a programme is simply not the matchday habit it used to be.
Andy Hall, United’s media officer and their programme editor for more than 18 years, says it is a hard conclusion to come to – but one that the numbers point towards with increasing force.
“It is a very, very difficult decision to make,” he says. “It genuinely is with a heavy heart. But we were talking about selling thousands only 20 years ago, and now we’re barely scraping a few hundred.
“We respect the fact there will be people upset by the decision – particularly collectors. But there are so few of them now.
“Yes, it has been part of the tradition of going to a football match for a long time. But sometimes you have to accept, alongside the tradition, that things are moving on and some things have to be let go.”
Today’s programme, for the visit of Harrogate Town, will be Hall’s 466th as editor. It is a job he has always carried out with dedication and an immense amount of hours, but gradually it has become a more thankless task.
“It’s something you go into every season accepting you’re going to do, and you take a lot of pride in that. Yet the landscape has changed so much,” he says.
“When I took over as editor back in 2004, my first programme was the home game against Barnet in the Conference, and we ordered 3,500 programmes. That stayed pretty steady all the way through until getting towards the mid 2010s, when we started to realise that sales were dropping so much that it was getting harder to convince potential sponsors and advertisers that it was a worthwhile avenue.
“We tried different things, like a magazine called United Scene for two seasons. We tried different sizes of programme, from 16 pages to 72. We tried a magazine in conjunction with a smaller programme.
“We even went online, with an interactive matchday digital programme, but found that, five games in, we had sold one.
“All in all, we’ve found that the trend, particularly in the last two to three seasons, is unavoidable: people do not buy printed products at football matches very much any more, unless they are invested in saving them.”
The stark reality was underlined when Carlisle hosted Hartlepool United recently, and attracted a healthy midweek crowd of 5,172, yet sales of the programme did not even make a profit.
“If they don’t sell, why expend all that energy?” asks Hall.
“You’ve got two people in our media department [Hall and Amy Nixon] and two of our days are taken up on getting the programme put together, proofed, and turned around to get out in time for matchday. Is that wise, if it is no longer viable?
“And when you look at where people are, with all the metrics that are available, people are online. You can post the same thing online as you put in your programme and the reach is sometimes 2-300 times what you get from your programme.”
If there is an inevitability about the end of the printed programme – and other clubs at Carlisle’s level have already taken such a decision – it is still a moment of some sadness in the matchday culture.
Hall has been proud to have been in charge of it for so long, having first worked on it on a part-time basis in 2000/1. Ian Atkins was the first manager whose programme notes he transcribed, at a time Hall and Barbara Abbott had come to prominence through their supporters’ website, called Three Games In Hand.
“When the previous media officer left at very short notice in October 2004, I took over,” he adds. “It’s been my life for 19 years.
“The first one was massive for me. To be editor of the club you supported’s programme, and for it to go down as well as it did, was something special. We won awards for a couple of seasons, when we were with Print Graphic, a Carlisle-based company on Warwick Road – we had a wonderful relationship and between us we produced something people talked about.
“A particularly memorable one was when we played Tottenham in September 2012, in the League Cup, I don’t know what it was about that programme in particular, but it flew and we did a rerun. There were comments made by the Tottenham media people to say there were ideas in there they were going to pick up on.”
Hall combined programme editing with his day job in the Army for several years at the beginning, before becoming full-time media man at the Blues. “Without the wonderful help of Barbara Abbott to get me through that period, none of that would have happened,” he adds.
The likelihood of the programme coming to an end was discussed at United’s last supporters’ groups (CUSG) meeting. Some ideas were aired with a view to keeping certain aspects alive, such as the chairman and manager’s notes.
United’s remaining nine home games (plus, potentially, a play-off home leg) will no doubt form a collectors’ countdown. It is highly possible that the programme produced for the visit of Salford City, on Saturday, April 29, will be the Blues’ last.
“If we’re going into the play-offs, the play-off home fixture will be a special edition – we’re already talking about that,” says Hall, not wanting to jinx the idea that Carlisle could finish higher than fourth…
There will, he admits, be a sort of ‘wow’ moment if and when it is decided that the game is up for the programme. “But because of the nature of the job we have, I’m already thinking about what else we’re going to do online and use that time for…not so much to generate cash, but hits, interest, goodwill, feeling.”
The final throes of the matchday programme feels like a moment to mark. There is faint hope that the end can be averted, but the signs point strongly one way.
“If sales were to pick up dramatically, for whatever reason, into the high hundreds at least, you’d have to say this is worthwhile. I don’t foresee that happening,” Hall adds.
“We have genuinely tried, and hoped it would keep going, and pick up – but it just hasn’t.”
What do you think about the likely end of the matchday programme at Carlisle United? Let us know in the comments, or via Twitter @joncolman, or emailing jon.colman@newsquest.co.uk
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