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.)

Paul Football Late Tackle