Forget about fantasy football, in the late 1970s there was only one imaginary soccer competition worth bothering with – the Scoop Inter City Superleague. Not only did the football comic league pitch Britain’s best footballers (Kenny Dalglish, Bob Latchford, Trevor Francis…) against each other, but it was run by a huge 1970s computer roughly the size of one of those big American refrigerators (complete with dot matrix data read-out and a reel-to-reel “memory bank”).

The prospect of a football competition presided over by a massive electronic overlord was a thrilling one for any imaginative young football fan, but the reality proved to be somewhat less exciting. The Super Scoop 2000 Sports Computer turned out to be a know-all control freak, and its story highlights the dangers of combining football and technology…

Read the full story in issue #3 of Late Tackle.
(A version of this article also appeared on Sabotage Times.)

Football Late Tackle

Tevez, Eto’o and Gyan are among the latest breed of players to be tarred with the ‘football mercenary’ brush. But they have nothing on this 1970s Scoop comic superstar.

Jon Stark arrived on the football scene in the late 1970s, a prolific striker who played for numerous clubs in England and abroad on a nomadic career path motivated entirely by money. A self-styled ‘Matchwinner for Hire’, his terms of service were set out on his business card: ‘£1,000 per match plus £250 per goal, no payment for lost games.’ Playing for different clubs every week, wherever the promise of payment took him, Stark was the ultimate football mercenary. He was, of course, entirely fictional – a comic book character created against the backdrop of a real-life transfer revolution under the strapline: ‘Meet the Footballer of the Future…’

Read the full story in issue 2 of Late Tackle magazine.

Football Late Tackle