In the days of Xg and bollocks like that we all sit back and tut at the crude and stupid clickbait it produces but sometimes, sometimes you just have to stand back and admire things. Take this for example, as news broke of James Trafford’s proposed £40m move to Leeds this quite incredible and utterly pointless stat appeared on google, it will stay with me for a long time.

It is something so pointless and unhinged that any fanzine would have been proud of it and so this week lets dip back again into the murky world of fanzines and their ‘firm’ grasp of statistics and you’ll see that nothing is new and that fanzines really were the social media of their day.

Fair Play

The very first general fanzine, Foul wasn’t averse to some tongue in cheek stats and this appeared in issue 23 November 1974. The points system itself is hardly evenly weighted but it’s the glee with which our correspondent reports that has me chuckling about Chelsea, under newly installed coach Eddie McCreadie, setting a new record. Ron Suart was actually manager at the time but Eddie gets the credit for a record that would easily beaten today.

Chelsea were already in irreversible decline by the time Eddie was installed as manager in April 1975 and relegation to Division 2 came soon after. This record imaginary 61 point haul was 28 more than their actual points total for a season in which they only finished above Carlisle. Give Eddie his due though, he restructured Chelsea and they were promoted back to the top tier in 1977 before a quite incredible tale unfolded; Having won promotion, his request for a company car was rejected by chairman Brian Mears so he resigned. Mears relented and offered him the car but Eddie’s sense of pride prevented him from returning to Chelsea. Maybe they wouldn’t have needed the Abramovic’ roubles if Eddie was a little more flexible..

Even more bizarre was the cover of issue 23 carrying news of parrot power in the league. I know this isn’t stats but I just felt compelled to point it out.

As is the way with fanzines, when directed to page 3 what we get are a series of newspaper clippings with the word parrot included in the usual phrases plus news of an outbreak of what appears to be bird flu well before the newspapers invented that phrase to scare people.

Actually this does lead us eventually back to “stats”, turn to page 10 and there is nothing about parrots but there is the Foul £ndex, a feature that appeared regularly as a spoof on the burgeoning interest in the stock market. It sort of makes sense, goals in the Striker sector depressing values in the Defence markets. The Beers/Wines and Foodstuffs sectors are brilliant.

Departures Board

I should perhaps have saved the cover of Issue 1 of the Blyth Spartans classic fanzine It’s Spartans v Arsenal if.. for a #FloodlightFriday post. Anyway, it appeared as the Winter 1994 issue for the 1994-95 season and saw our heroes deciding they needed to update fans with a great stat about sending offs and other departures from the club so far. The defence is clearly the problem and in fact there is so little activity elsewhere in the team they feel the need to put a whole Spartan in the middle of the page.

There’s no mention as to whether these were straight reds or accumulations, no comment on the rights and wrongs of the dismissals, just the bare facts and I love it. Functional, all the info available at a glance and totally useless. More worrying though is the fact that another defender, Laurie Pearson appears to have simply disappeared, he’s done a Reggie Perrin and his current status is not known. If you’re out there Laurie (sic, it was actually spelt Lawrie), let us know you are OK or perhaps you’re still on the pig farm? Through the wonders of the internet I know that he actually became community officer at Middlesbrough, I mean it’s not that far away is it? 1994 was a different age..or maybe they just didn’t want to say the M word.

My Head Hurts

I do love opening a fanzine from down the pyramid so let’s travel now to London and visit Enfield classic Talk of The Town End. Volume 11 number 4 (terrible numbering system lads, utterly terrible) appeared in January 1995 and I assume the creators were Pretenders fans.

At first glance there are some fairly standard stats. I loved looking at stuff like this in programmes but sometimes, as is the case here, your head could start to swim pretty quickly.

These stats are to 26/12/94 and I assume for the season and that the left table is appearances and the right goals. Maybe I’m being finicky but that really should be made clearer. DL seems to be league but they were in the Isthmian League in 94/95 so what’s the D? Is F friendly? What is CC? With respect to goals I’m assuming the subscript p is penalty and Paul Hobson is the penalty specialist with Gary Abbott having snaffled one. I assume own goals are FOR the team and why are they silly? Then there are the career records…Andy Pape has 409 -0…appearances and goals? He’d only played for Enfield for 6ish years by 1994 so 409 appearances would be roughly 68 games per season?! 0 Was he a goalkeeper? (He was – Ed)

Turn over the page and there is another cracker, this time to 19/12/94..why the week gap? Did they have separate statisticians, one for appearances and goals, one for goals and assists? I think we should be told….and also ASSISTS? in 1995? I thought this was only introduced about 10 years ago as the fever dream of some Sky exec’ but no, there it is in all its glory in 1995 for Isthmian League Enfield. Along with all that we get mins instead of the more sensible games played, why not? Finally apparently Pape A has 1 ass. Don’t we all.

Enfield would top the Isthmian League at the end of the 94/95 season but were denied promotion to the Conference (CL) due to financial issues. If they kept books like they recorded stats I’m not surprised. Look I love a stat BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PUT HEADINGS AND KEYS ON YOUR TABLES AND USE NORMAL METRICS!

Love and Hate, Mostly Hate

Sometimes the stats came in the form of a graph but despite this they are still terrible and in some cases, wholly made up. Take this one from Norwich fanzine Ferry ‘Cross The Wensum. Issue 16 from January 1996 saw the chaps in full flow protesting about the much loved Robert Chase.

There are no other stats in the fanzine, nor any explanation of this graph and their sources but who cares, it makes the point. The range of anti Chase cartoons and articles within is breathtaking though, they really didn’t like him. You can tell by how upset they are about the pursuit of Dean Windass though I’d have thought you’d be relieved that you didn’t spend £750k on him.

Windass’ moved instead to Aberdeen where his time was marked by an incident in a game vs Dundee United whereby he committed three separate red-card offences in the same match, first being dismissed for two yellow cards, then cited for verbally abusing the referee, and finally for kicking over a corner flag as he left the field. Later in his career Dean had his debut for Middlesbrough delayed due to a back injury he picked up lifting a bag out of the car. Great stuff.

They really hated Robert Chase, with a passion.

The Carefree Rating^TM

Finally let’s wander back to London and visit Chelsea in March of 1993 and take in the glory of the Carefree fanzine player rating system. Amazingly, they don’t appear to have trade marked this. There is no explanation in the fanzine for the logic or thought process behind this, it’s just yet another example of the brilliant creativity that went on in fanzines, even if it strictly speaking wasn’t needed and was complete bollocks. Carefree had a rudimentary charting programme and they were sure going to use it (Pigbag’s less successful follow up single)

I guess no explanation is needed really, it’s a very simple rating. Average of goals for the team when playing – Average of goals against with that figure added to average points per game played giving you the The Carefree Rating^TM (You haven’t have you?! – Ed). I mean of course the less games you have played the more likely you are to have a poor rating surely; all of the bottom 10 players have played less than 5 games, in most cases less than 2 so fate or form hasn’t really had a chance to do its work.

I then started to look at averages by position…no I didn’t, I’m not quite that sad though I’m sure I could pop this table into some stupid AI engine and ask it to do something equally as pointless, time and resource wasting. (hope you like the AI slop feature image btw!) Anyway, not only was there a table but there was a magnificent graph as well, utilising one of those pointless skewed perspectives that were popular during a dreadful 80 stack presentation back in the day. All in black and white obviously. Lovely stuff.

The Final Whistle

Over half the exhibits in this weeks blog (+50% statistically speaking) were found as I wrote this by just randomly opening a fanzine from my collection. The use of statistics filled space and provided laughs/talking points and is still doing so decades later for people like me..I’m not having a pop at any of the people who produced this stuff, it is truly remarkable given that a lot of it was done without the “benefit” of excel and powerpoint that we enjoy today. It shows a passion for a team or a cause or just a simple, creative way of protesting and making a point and it brings me joy to know people care, even if it is in a slightly unhinged way sometimes.

More importantly this blog demonstrates that quite a lot of the things we scoff at as being “modern” were in fact for better or worse were considered as being of use decades ago even if it was just for filling pages in a fanzine. Fanzines once again proving to be ahead of their time.