Ink, Injury Crises and Insults About the Weather: Non-League Programme Notes, Ranked
Photo: Anonymous photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
At Soccer Football, we have a soft spot for the scruffy bit of folded A5 that gets handed over with the change from a fiver. The glossy matchday programme may be fading elsewhere, but at non-league level it is still doing proper work. It carries the teams, the adverts for a local taxi firm, the half-time scores and — most importantly — the notes.
These are not corporate communications. They are not run past a press officer, a brand consultant or a lawyer with a nervous twitch. They are written by people who have spent all week worrying about a left-back’s hamstring and a boiler that has packed in behind the tea hut. That makes them the closest thing football has to unfiltered literature.
Welcome to the Programme Notes Hall of Fame. Here are the archetypes that deserve a place in the national archive, ranked.
5. The Volunteer Roll Call
This is the entry that begins with a list of names and ends with a plea. It thanks the turnstile operators, the car-park stewards, the person who washed the kit and the poor soul who spent Saturday morning clearing glass from the away changing room. Then comes the kicker: we could do with a few more helpers. If you can spare an hour, come and find us.
It is easy to skip past these notes. They are not dramatic. But they tell you more about a club’s health than any league table. A club that keeps naming its volunteers is a club that knows where its pulse is coming from.
4. The Chairman’s Cryptic Funding Update
The chairman’s column is a particular art form. It must sound optimistic without promising anything, serious without alarming anyone, and grateful without admitting that the floodlights are being paid for in instalments. The result often reads like a riddle wrapped in a spreadsheet.
You will get lines about “ongoing discussions”, “a positive meeting with the council” and “some exciting news we hope to share soon”. Every so often, a sentence lands with the blunt force of a falling scaffold: “We still need £4,000 before the end of the month.” The chairman’s notes are where club culture meets club economics, usually over a cup of tea and a mild sense of dread. They are essential reading because they are honest in ways that official statements rarely are.
3. The Injury-Crisis Apology
No programme is complete without a manager explaining that the squad is down to its bare bones. The goalkeeper has a shoulder problem. The centre-half is suspended. The striker is on a course. The reserve left-back has gone to university. And the physio has a bad back, which is not ideal.
What makes this entry great is the apology. It is usually directed at the supporters who travelled to a midweek defeat and saw a 17-year-old make his debut in midfield. The manager knows it was not good enough. He also knows there was almost nothing else he could do. The injury-crisis apology is football’s most human column: a public admission that the best-laid plans of a volunteer-run club can be undone by a single rolled ankle.
2. The Referee Rant Disguised as a Weather Report
This is the crown jewel of passive-aggressive programme writing. The manager starts with the conditions — the wind, the rain, the pitch, the cold — and then, somehow, the referee appears. Not named, of course. Just “the official” or “the man in the middle”. The decisions are described as “difficult to fathom” or “consistent only in their inconsistency”.
It is a referee rant wearing a raincoat. And it is brilliant. Not because the manager is right, necessarily, but because it captures the raw, slightly unreasonable emotional weather of a Saturday afternoon. You can almost hear the tea hut chatter between the lines.
1. The Manager’s State of the Nation
The best programme notes are the ones where the manager forgets he is writing notes and starts writing a sermon. He talks about the club’s identity, the young lads coming through, the older heads who have stayed too long, the supporters who make the place feel like home. He might even mention the opposition with genuine respect, which is always a sign that something serious is about to follow.
This is the column that makes you put the programme down for a second. It is scruffy, sentimental and occasionally far too long. It is also the last unfiltered voice in football. Treat it as literature, not filler. And if you see a manager’s notes that begin “I wasn’t going to write anything this week”, clear your afternoon.
