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Welcome to: 
It's all based round my childhood friend, "The Wonderful World of Soccer Stars Gala Collection" an
FKS picture stamp album from the 1970-71 season. It has been expanded to cover all players and managers from the season.
Find out all about your favourite player or favourite team from the 1970-71 Season !!!
Read the unedited FourFourTwo interview 'Online Oddity - A Soccer Web Master Interviewed ' (below),
which explains more about me and the origins of these pages.
I rely on your feedback and the order I develop teams and player pages will be strongly influenced by request so do e-mail me with any requests for information.
Players to be included are anyone who was involved in professional or semi-professional football in 1970-71 as a player, manager, coach, Scout, director - or their relatives in any country, and even the odd professional team youth player ... I'm none too strict ...
'Online Oddity or Wonder of the Web ?' I am the web master for a web site Bob and 1970-71 Footballers. Robert Jeffrey, from a national UK Football Magazine 'FourFourTwo' wrote to me so that I could be featured in an article about odd football sites.
The feature appeared in the October 2000 issue no. 74, pp 140-141. Here is the complete (very mildly updated) interview.
Robert Jeffrey : It'd be great to know a bit about the background to the site. How did you get started ?
Bob : The lie : I was sat at work feeling that there was a greater purpose to my life, when Billy Bremner appeared to me in angelic form and with a wave of his arm and flutter of his wings uttered, 'Bob from this day forth you shall be known as "Bob of the 1970-71 Footballers" and you shall spend every waking hour obsessively finding out and writing about footballers from that season', and as the awe of his pure heavenly white presence had rendered me speechless, I found I could not utter the question, 'Why ???????'
And as suddenly as he had appeared so it was that he began to fade. Before he faded altogether he said 'Go forth Bob, and do as I say and your reward will be great. Incidentally, tell Craig Brown all he needs to do to win the next World Cup is ...' and he was gone.
The truth : I bought a book on HTML code, and on the 4th April 1999 sent my first page to the Internet which is an early form of the page that is still there now, and I haven't looked back since. The nature of my site is that it can be built up without essentially changing anything, other than making the information more accurate and complete. Hence it evolves rather than changes. It gathers information like a rolling snowball getting bigger and bigger (and more and more out of control !).
RJ : Why you have a particular interest in 1970-71 ?
Bob : When I was 6 years old, the turn of the decade felt very much like the change of the Millennium. Commentators today talk so much bosh when they say that 1970 was like the closing chapter of the Sixties. At six it wasn't about endings, to me it was like a fresh new beginning to everything that was about to happen. And I was beginning to become aware of the wider world around me. And in footballing terms, of course, there was the World Cup in Mexico.
The earliest game I know for a fact that I watched in my life was England v Brazil - what a great start ! Football wasn't on the telly live in the same way back then, very few matches were live, so the World Cup was extra special ... and there was a Soccer Stamps album that went with it. At six the competition itself was only played out to see how well the stars in your stamp album did !!! I got a complete set, and I truly loved that album. I played with the pictures in games I invented for myself which essentially involved re-running the World Cup again and again using tiddleywinks, or blow football (subbeuteo wasn't around in our street then).
When the new season came along, a new album came with it, and I liked collecting the stamps, no differently to the way my son collects Pokemon now - the only difference was these players really existed. Every Sunday I would rush to the Sports section of the paper and 'update the book', which meant writing down all the transfers from one club, and marking down anyone who had scored. This web page is an extension of that exact same thing. The Next Generation News page is a direct descendent of what I did for those players' fathers back in 1970 !!!
And I didn't stop at the end of the season, I carried on 2-3 years until the book itself had fallen apart at the seams and was scribbled to bits. As I was older, I just did it in more grown up ways, using Rothmans Football Yearbooks, and ultimately Barry Hugman's books. If I couldn't get to a real match, I would listen to the live commentaries and update my figures. I would do yearly updates, but gradually, of course they all retired, so that wasn't necessary any more. (Still awake ???)
Anyway, in 1998 I got a computer, and I thought I'd get my information all typed up for once and for all. And then it occurred to me, if I did it for me why not do it for the whole world ? Somebody, somewhere out there might just want to see it. I figured if only one person looked at it, that was one more than if it was sat in my cupboard at home. So it began. In fact I get way over 40,000 hits a month. Monster!
RJ : Why didn't you extend the site to cover other years ?
Bob : Time.
Originally it didn't even have everyone from the 70-71 season, and my job was a lot easier ... What happened was people wrote e-mails to me asking about so-and-so who was a Plymouth player in the Sixties, and I just got curious to find out more. It fitted in with other people's idea about what the site should be about, so I guess it was in response to feedback.
It makes the pages a lot more illogical and bizarre, players suddenly get loads of news stories about them, when the previous week they weren't on it at all ! Initially I wanted to avoid that, then I just changed my mind, the idea of chaos began to appeal. I did always hope that someone would help me out by writing their own team's 70-71 page which I could either link to or put up on my own site, but funnily enough, no-one else is similarly obsessed !! *(See note below.) It also has allowed Kevin Keegan, Alex Ferguson, Michael Owen on the site, for instance, which means loads of news stories can be given a 70-71 twist that no-one would have believed was there.
But to extend further and do other years also, would just be too much. Maybe someone else would like to do them !
That said, if anyone emails me about a player from another era, I do my best to answer the query or include their information on the site. The 70-71 season, is just my way of saying, 'a site on football history'
RJ : What is your own background ?
Bob: I'm actually a psychiatric nurse, working in the community. (N.B. See more at www.bobdunning.net )
RJ : What sort of reaction have you had to the site ?
Bob : One person wrote to me to say that it reminded them of when they were young and cutting out pictures to stick in a scrap book and I wrote back saying it reminded me of that too !
RJ : Do people consider it odd?
Bob : Well I do. Some people who write have very sincerely written that they've felt quite moved by the site (honestly) because it's brought back such good memories. I get many letters from ex-pats, and I think it hits a nostalgia button. I try to make the site as forward looking as a site about football from over 30 years ago can be, hence the emphasis on 'where are they now?' and all the news pages.
Only friends have come out and said 'it's odd'. I had an e-mail from a friend with the subject title, 'you sad man' which is very true.
RJ : Which other sites do you find strange?
Bob : To be honest, on the football front, there aren't that many, I'll look forward to your site to find some.
Christian Kelly's www.onthecross.co.uk/ was the first person who collaborated with me so he has a good sense of 1970-71 fun, although I'm not sure he was even born then. He's very funny in his e-mails, but the sight isn't odd as such.
www.hometown.aol.com/ironopolis/index.htm always struck me as superbly minority interest because I can't imaging there are many active fans left.
www.angelfire.com/de/craigboardmansboots/index.html The bloke is off his rocker and you can't get a straight e-mail out of him.
www.footie51.co.uk/feature_nostalgia.htm and it's links. footie 51 is a big favourite of mine and sometimes comes from a similar angle to myself.
Fanzines are as close as you get to oddness, but like I say I've not come across too much myself yet. Humour often means a figure p*ssing on a Man U badge, which was probably funny the first time.
There is that site on footballers haircuts, I never did go to that, I must do, I'm not sure of the address.
So how's all that going to fit into 25 words for your magazine ???? I look forward to reading it if you do use any of it. Thanks for showing an interest, if you want to know the real, real reason I started the website, it was for just that, to get someone's attention for 2 minutes who might otherwise never have heard of me !
On 20/11/2001 and 23/4/03 I very mildly brought one or two of the answers up to date, so that it can be read as a current article.
* Note (from above) This is not quite so true now as there 2 more exclusive 1970-71 sites, plus others very closely relevent. Go to Links, and check
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