Last week's announcement that the British Library's newspaper depository at Colindale will be shutting its doors in 2012 is a significant blow for sports fans. Over the past decade I have spent hours absorbed in its collection and quickly recognised that a considerable proportion of the community that gathered there were people engaged in research on football, whether writing books or simply finding the material to furnish their own peculiar obsessions. On some days they would even outnumber the family tree surgeons who, with pencils poised, would painstakingly leaf through reams of newsprint in search of an elusive mention of an obscure ancestor.
When Sportspages, the Charing Cross Road book shop, closed down I had often wondered where those who had found a haven among its statistical histories had ended up. The man who reeked of Dettol and spent years crouched on his haunches by the football shelves furiously eviscerating each Breedon club complete record and jotting down his finds, or the hare-eyed chap with the roll-up permanently wedged behind his ear who would badger the staff to open each incoming box from a particular publisher with the rather disarming cry of "Anything fresh?"
The answer was simple enough – they had moved up the Northern Line and been displaced to Colindale and they had substituted local newspapers for reference books as their primary resources. Many seemed to be engaged on projects that would not only never get published but also actually never get written, the quest to produce something definitive ultimately making the perpetual research process an end in itself. I remember one telling me that he was aiming to compile the greatest database of UK swimming records in history and found the very elusiveness of the material the fascination of the challenge. To my knowledge it has never seen the light of day but I confidently expect to see him on my next visit to the library still beavering away.
I can sympathise with the predicament. There is no better way to get a flavour of the football era you are writing about than to immerse yourself in the contemporary reports in local newspapers. The problem is that it is endlessly diverting – come across a report of boys found guilty of stealing tomatoes from a greenhouse and sent for "borstal training" or an advert that reads "Lager used to be a summer drink, until Skol!" and your mind can wander away from your quest to find out how Leicester City's Colin Appleton had fared in a match against Burnley. But for putting flesh on the bones of your subject, I can think of no more rewarding distraction.
The bones themselves from 1970 onwards, at least if you're interested in league clubs, can, of course, be found in the pages of what habit still forces me to call "Rothmans". Those beloved blue, fractured spines that adorn my bookshelves are the positive legacy the firm that promoted itself as the jet-setter's oily rag of choice has left a generation of fans. Unlike Wisden with its breadth of beautiful writing and its fascinating byways that could steal away your day, its football counterpart's principal attribute is the comprehensive detail of the data.
Even in its modern guise, the yearbook continues to fulfil its remit of providing the authoritative seasonal summary. But now that all the statistics you may ever want are no more than a few clicks away, the game's "bible" has become for me more of a traditional purchase than the much-anticipated herald that a new season is upon us. Gone are the days, too, when in the shop we would expect to sell 400 copies on publication date and wrap up a thousand by the time the Charity Shield kicked off.
It was never my favourite annual – that dubious honour goes to the Almanacco Illustrato del Calcio, Panini's peerless Italian reference. We used to shift those by the hundred, too, as well as Finnish Jalkapallokirjas, Spanish Don Balónes and Dutch Voetbals. If you wanted to find out about European football back in those days, there was no other place to start. It's brilliant that you can access most of that information for free now but I still mourn the loss of the camaraderie felt by subscribers to those defiantly "old technology" volumes.
We used to refer to it jokingly as statistical pornography but the majority of its devotees exhibited such a charming and self‑knowing helplessness about their infatuations that their enthusiasm shaped the atmosphere of the shop and sustained the business for years.
When Colindale closes in 2012 I fear that another refuge for the trivia-enchanted sports fan will not take its place, somewhere that you could always wear your metaphorical anorak with pride. The internet provides things we could never have envisaged but the library's sense of community may be lost forever. I shall miss it.
