Soccer
When an battered Subbuteo set was bequeathed to the author in the mid-1990s, it ignited a passion – just not for the tiny soccer game itself. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
The tabletop game Subbuteo: finger-flicking good
Much of my sports equipment and fan gear as a child was either homemade or second-hand. Before newspaper deliveries and Macca’s kitchen shifts helped finance the occasional purchase of official playing kits, I used plain T-shirts and fabric markers to make my own. Hoops, bats and balls – ones designed for indoor use, at least – could be fashioned easily enough from salvaged waste.
This was more a function of youth’s passionate ingenuity than it was of Dickensian privation. My daughter can now occupy herself for hours making jewellery and doll’s houses from a variety of paper, cardboard and discarded juice bottles. It’s nice to think that a child’s imaginative repurposing of prosaic materials might be an instinct pursued independent of necessity.
And so it was that my Subbuteo set was a hand-me-down that obliged its loving restoration. Do you remember this? Probably not, though it’s still sold today, in tiny numbers and an age after the peak of its popularity. For simulated soccer, these tabletop games were eclipsed long ago by the EA Sports video game franchise – to Subbuteo what the F-22 Raptor is to the Wright Flyer.
By the time an old set came into my possession, the design of the game had changed considerably from its conception in 1946. Its inventor was Peter Adolph, a demobbed RAF officer, birdwatcher and gentle shyster who dreamt of independent wealth after the war.
He found it, although with an idea that wasn’t quite his own. Adolph’s scheme was the cheeky refinement/intellectual theft of an existing tabletop soccer game called Newfooty. When he wasn’t dealing rare bird eggs, he was in a small room in his home in Kent, England, designing little men who could be moved around a conceptual pitch.
The idea was simple: a soccer match that could be simulated at home by flicking weighted tokens around a pitch to make contact with a ball – possession was maintained until a flicked token missed it, knocked it out of play or “fouled” an opponent.
Adolph’s engineering breakthrough was the use of half-spherical buttons – literal buttons – that were given extra weight by gluing a washer to them. To these coloured bases were fixed the “player” – a thin piece of card, upon which a man was drawn. The ball was plastic and necessarily much larger than the players. The goals were made from thin wire, and their nets from paper. There was no pitch – the first sets were sold with chalk and instructions for drawing your own on a blanket.
The initial success of Subbuteo was born from a huckster’s gamble: with no sets made, much less a manufacturing process established, he took out an ad in the classifieds of a popular boy’s magazine. The game still didn’t have its name yet – Adolph placed the ad before he’d approached the patent office – but very quickly he received a small fortune in postal orders. Both pleased and panicked, he set out to fulfil the orders – and educed even more interest by taking out another ad apologising for the delay owing to overwhelming demand.
Adolph’s original name for his game was the peculiarly generic “The Hobby”, which was rejected. This might’ve been a happy outcome, though, because it obliged our ambitious entrepreneur to settle upon the distinctive “Subbuteo” – taken from the Latin name of the hobby falcon.
The thin, cardboard men – “flats”, they were called – were replaced in the 1960s by three-dimensional figurines. By this time, a pitch was provided too – a felt mat, properly marked, though notorious for the imperfections invariably made by the small folds and creases of fabric. By the late 1960s, Subbuteo had perfected the moulded figures, offered a huge range of teams and Newfooty folded.
By now, the sport it simulated had grown in popularity, helped by England winning the 1966 World Cup, and its collectability – in the form of specific, hand-painted teams – was enjoyed by a young generation removed from the war’s austerity.
Something like this version came into my possession in the mid ’90s. My benefactor was a schoolmate, and the set had been in his family for a long time gathering dust. They had a pool table now, and a Nintendo, and by the time I gratefully received the game, Subbuteo was well into its decline.
Sales had peaked during the 1970s and early ’80s, and the set was now being eclipsed by the emergence of video games, first in arcades and then at home.
If the popularity of Subbuteo was in a bad way, so too was my set, and I recovered my father’s old hobby paints and glue that he’d once used for model aircraft. I’d inherited a mess of amputees and figures wholly estranged from their bases, and I went to work recovering their dignity.
After limbs were restored to men and men restored to their bases, my next job was the painting of these figures in distinctive shirts. I’d not only inherited amputees but a confusing mix of teams, and two sides of 11 would have to be handpainted. In deciding the shirts, my principal motivation was aesthetic, not partisan, and at the time I thought the strips of Celtic and Blackburn Rovers could give my wee men some flair. Green and white hoops for Celtic; blue and white halves for the Rovers. And so they were painted, devotedly but with obvious clumsiness.
Absent from my set, however, were any goals. I made my own from dowelling, which I painted white, and fixed nets to them made from the plastic webbing of fruit bags. They were orange, or perhaps red, and they offered a lovely contrast to the white of the goal and the green of the grass.
As Subbuteo grew in popularity, in a time just before my birth, its production of profitable accoutrements became more sophisticated. One could not only buy Juventus or Barcelona but also Coventry City and Zurich Grasshopper, just as one could buy stadia, corner flags, photographers and even coppers.
In my case, I’d inherited fencing. Green plastic pickets with brown posts with which you could trace the pitch. As part of my project to rehabilitate and modernise my Subbuteo set, I made advertising hoardings to affix to them. Upon very narrow strips of paper, I carefully committed the commercial emblems of Ribena, Carlsberg and Brother electronics with a felt pen.
I also became a groundskeeper, enlivening the faded pitch marks with liquid paper and ensuring the turf’s fidelity with an iron. An already infuriating game was always worsened by the small hills and valleys of the pitch.
The problem, after my project of rehabilitation was complete, was that I was left with a game nobody wanted to play – including myself. A game that was absurdly and tiresomely finicky; the literal flicking of buttons around a pitch. It required extraordinary patience to master, and yet the thing to be mastered seemed so silly. While the object was a pleasing replication of a soccer pitch, Subbuteo itself was utterly alien to the game it simulated.
We much preferred playing the real game ourselves, competitively, or down in the park. There was also our indoor soccer league and invented games played in the streets, and if it was raining, or we were lazy, there was always recourse to Subbuteo’s enemy: computer games.
My passion, I suppose, was for restoration rather than the thing being restored.
In 1969, Peter Adolph sold Subbuteo for £250,000 to Waddingtons, a Yorkshire company and the manufacturer of Cluedo. It was a life-changing sum, but when sales continued to increase throughout the next decade, he would come to regret accepting the offer as it was. In the 1970s, Waddingtons made hay and The Undertones made lyrics from it, but the writing was on the wall. By the time Subbuteo featured in the 1997 Spice Girls movie, it was as a cheesy slice of pop Britannia.
Adolph died in 1994, the same year Waddingtons was bought by American gaming giant Hasbro, and so he never had the opportunity to watch Mel C’s glib violation of the game’s rules in Spice World and dream of its popular revival. He would’ve been disappointed, anyway: the Spice Girls’ de facto endorsement did nothing for sales. Hasbro didn’t like the anaemic numbers and ended Subbuteo’s production in 2000. It’s been fitfully revived since, with modest production, limited distribution and a commercial eye to nostalgic collectors rather than a mass audience.
So it goes. But the game had made Adolph wealthy and independent and – according to his son Mark’s memoir of him – after his serial affairs ended in divorce in the 1970s, Adolph spent his remaining years wandering the globe watching birds.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "Finger-flicking good".
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