100 Club: The Farcical and Thoroughly Forgettable Football League Celebrations of 30 Years Ago

100 Club: The Farcical and Thoroughly Forgettable Football League Celebrations of 30 Years Ago
09:15, 25 Apr 2018

Thirty years ago the Football League celebrated its centenary with a series of bizarre and at times bonkers events, culminating in a mid-season micro-tournament which saw the likes of Tranmere Rovers and Wigan Athletic rub shoulders with Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and Manchester United at a half-empty Wembley.

The Mercantile Credit Football Festival, to give it its proper name, was just part of the Football League’s spectacularly drawn-out 100th anniversary celebrations of 1988 and was played over the weekend of April 16 and 17, involving 16 teams in a series of 40-minute mini-matches; but to understand the full extent of those extended celebrations you have to go back almost nine months earlier.

That’s because this feast of football began back on 8 August 1987 as a Football League select side faced a World XI at Wembley, and despite the appearance of Diego Maradona, who had dumped England out of the World Cup a year before; the game was something of a non-event.

The two teams, managed by England manager Bobby Robson and Barcelona boss Terry Venables, were picked from some of the finest talent on the planet at the time as domestic based players like Liam Brady, Bryan Robson and Ossie Ardiles faced off against international stars including; Josimar, Michel Platini and Thomas Berthold.

From Maradona, who had apparently been paid £100,000 to turn up, being roundly booed by the far from capacity crowd for his antics in Mexico to a steady stream of substitutions, the game was nothing short of a glorified exhibition game that the Football League XI eventually won 3-0 to kick-off a number of events over the following 12 months.

Fast forward to April 1988 and as Liverpool are running away with the First Division title and supposedly on course for a second league and cup double, an entire weekend of top-flight action was put on hold for the next instalment in the longest birthday celebrations ever known.

The so-called festival of football saw teams from across all four divisions invited to take part in a two-day knockout cup. Eight teams represented the First Division, while four came from the Second Division and two each from Divisions Three and Four, all of whom had qualified thanks to a baffling system which saw teams ranked based upon the points they gained between December and March.

If the qualification process appeared convoluted it was nothing compared to the tournament itself with games comprising of two, 20-minute halves, in order to complete all the fixtures, with draws being decided by immediate and sudden death penalty shoot-outs.

It’s probably no surprise then that only eight goals were scored in the eight stunted first-round matches with 15 being settled by spot-kicks; not much in the way of entertainment for the 41,000 who turned up on the Saturday for the early rounds or the 17,000 who were in attendance on the Sunday for two semi-finals and the final.

To make things worse all the clubs participating were allocated their own section of the famous old ground but this meant that when those teams weren’t in action most fans headed off in search of alternative entertainment; leaving huge sections of concrete terracing embarrassingly empty.

The most notable showing of the weekend probably came from Tranmere who upset whatever odds were being offered to reach the semi-final stages after impressive wins against that season’s eventual FA Cup winners Wimbledon and Newcastle United, who had beaten champions elect Liverpool at the first stage, before being defeated by Nottingham Forest just shy of the final.

So after beating Leeds and Aston Villa in the early rounds Forest would eventually lift the first, and as yet only, trophy of this sort against Sheffield Wednesday, again on penalties, and despite manager Brian Clough’s failure to even turn up to the two-day event their thrill at winning saw the club add the title to their official list of honours to go with the Football League First Division Championship and the European Cup.

But that wasn’t the end of the painful proceedings and as the gripping 1988/89 season began some four months later we were treated to the similarly named, and just as dull, Mercantile Credit Centenary Trophy, a knockout tournament involving the top eight Division One clubs from the previous season, which Stuart Jones described in The Times as: “The closing debacle of the embarrassing League centenary celebrations.”

Once again the nation showed little interest as barely 10,000 watched QPR lose to Arsenal at Loftus Road; 20,000 went to Anfield to see Liverpool defeat Nottingham Forest while Wimbledon were expected to make a midweek trip to Newcastle for a game which only 17,000 could be bothered to watch.

The final was eventually contested between Arsenal and Manchester United at Villa Park – Wembley was apparently shunned in honour of former Villa Chairman William McGregor who was instrumental in the formation of the Football League – though many felt it was due to the lack of interest.

And somewhat ironically in the pouring rain Arsenal brought the curtain down on the dampest of damp squibs with an emphatic 3-0 victory which was witnessed by a crowd of just 30,000; a fitting end to a season-and-a-half long series of forgettable games and elongated events which was later described as “the 100 year bore.”

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