• Misc. Football Games: 1950s-70s (this page); 1980s-2000s

• Super Striker Tribute - Page 1: Parker Sets. Page 2 Palitoy and Peter Pan.

• Newfooty: 1929-1952; 1953-1960s 

• Table Association Football 4-2-4

• Subbuteo Main page.

• Subbuteo Football boxed editions, and Five-a-side and Junior Editions.

Having produced pages on both Striker and Newfooty, it seemed reasonable to provide a quick round up of other similar football games that appeared on the market in the Subbuteo era.

This is an ongoing section of the website. I have very little detail on some of these games, sometimes little more than a picture or two. So if your second favourite football game is missing, or lacking in details then please write in and tell me about it. Alternatively, if you owned one of these games and it was a complete dog then again, let me know and I'll warn football game collectors :-)

I've deliberately avoided card games, board games, computer games, and anything with rotating rods. The games here will generally have some degree of action, and individual players.

Magnetic Football Games 1950s-60s.

This seemed to have been a bit of a craze in the 1950s. There were several manufacturers of this type of game, but the principle was the same. Each playing piece had a magnet on the bottom of the base, which was manipulated by a rod which went under the table. The magnets of each team were polarised  in reverse, so you could not affect your opponents players with your rod. The players were then used to push the ball around the pitch. Goalkeepers could either be on magnets like the outfielders, or on a rod like Subbuteo. The game boards were pretty similar with a smooth wooden or plastic surface, some form of fence surround, and legs to enable you to get under the pitch. 

Well known versions of this game included:

• "Super Soccer" by Balyna (Toogood and Jones of Whitstable in Kent). Came in a large card box. Pitch had lovely wooden sides and a tough fabric pitch. The legs were plastic, with suction cupped feet. This smart set up was ruined slightly by some very cheap looking players. The goalkeeper was on a plastic rod, but was the same horrible kicking player casting of the outfield players. This was a five-a-side set, bases were red and blue, wider at the bottom, and generally a nice design. The rods were plastic and matched the base colours. The goals sat within the pitch and were small, narrow and flimsy.
  Balyna also produced tabletop versions of other games in the same format, including cricket. I've also seen a (smooth finish) pitch with rugby markings on the reverse, but sadly there were no rules or figures with it. So if anyone has the rules for this, I'd like to know.

• "Socrates" (Soccer at Ease!) by Bill Keeling's New Footy Company. This game is shown in detail on the Keeling Games page. It used the flat celluloid figures of the standard Newfooty game, and came in a variety of sizes from a basic two-a-side version, with the pitch built into the box, to a five-a-side version played on a large board. The five-a-side had four magnetic rods, so each team could be controlled by two players, and also featured a rugby variant on the reverse.

• "Soccerette", by (surprisingly) Soccerette Limited, Newmarket, Suffolk. I have seen two different versions of this game. Early versions had the players shown below, whilst the pitch and rods had a rugged wood and bolts look. The goals in this set were gaps in the wooden surround, like they would be in bar football. Note that the goalkeepers were on a magnet, and not on a rod.
  The other version looks later in date, and is more common. It is shown at the top of this article, and was similar in look to Balna's version, with small nets within the pitch, and a more professional gloss to the components.

I played a version of this game at the Woking Subbuteo fair, which did not seem to match any of the sets I've seen since. So I am sure there are more to uncover.

Magnetic football is fun and frenetic, and takes a little bit of skill. If you try to move things along too fast, or go for too much power when shooting, then you are liable to leave player or ball, or both behind. Although you couldn't control your opponent's players, your reversed magnet could be used to flip them over if you were sneaky.

Time has faded these Arsenal players to a fetching pink. 
Maybe this is apt for the player doing the "teapot" impression.
They come from an early Soccerette set.

According to Richard Payne's Subbuteo book, Peter Adolph did not actually regard Bayna's magnetic football as a rival, as he thought the two games complimented each other. This might have been because they both had a rival in Newfooty, or because both games came from Kent. I've been told that like Subbuteo and New Footy, Magnetic football had a Players Association, with leagues and tournaments. Sadly I've not seen any extra individual teams for these sets (but I stand to be corrected on this point!)

Balyna Football (the other one!)

Just to add to the confusion, as well as their magnetic set, Toogood and Jones produced this alternate indoor football game. Unlike the big box required for the "fixed pitch" of their magnetic game, Balyna Football was sold in a long thin box. It has a cloth pitch with a metal surround and goals. The players were on hollow bases and were directed towards the ball with a spoon-like "director". The ball was a flat disc. Hopefully the image from the rules will give you some idea of how this works. There was also a Balyna Cricket game produced in a similar long box format.

A big thank you to Filip Van Hulle who made me aware of this game.

Tipp-Kick (1950s? - 2000s)

Tipp-Kick is essentially the German version of Super Striker. Well actually, the principle is the same as the Peter Pan Cup Final game shown on the next page of this round-up, but comparing the game to the Peter Pan effort is doing it a disservice.

As Tipp-Kick is German, and does not seem to have spread to these shores in any numbers, I do not really have any information about its history. Certainly many versions exist.

Basically, each figure in the set has a moveable leg, and this is used to propel the ball. Tipp-Kick shares this feature with Striker, Targetman, Big League, and Cup Final, but it is likely that it pre-dates them all. The figures are unique in their construction, and they are made of metal. They have a metal rod passing through the figure that operates the kicking leg from a button on top of the head. Even the modern sets have these traditional metal players.

The goalkeeper in these later sets is plastic. He is a fixed position diving goalkeeper, and is operated using a box behind the goal. Pressing the buttons on the box make the goalkeeper dive. There is also a more sophisticated "star-keeper" that has the same control box, but a more complicated rod. I assume this is a keeper with animated arms in a similar way to Super Striker. The Star-Keeper appears to be wearing track-suit bottoms, which in real life does not usually signify a star goalkeeper.

The reason I mentioned Cup Final rather than striker, is that the ball is not round, but instead it is a multi-sided object in two colours. Each team has a colour, and the player whose colour is on top can play the ball. 

The set featured here is a modern "Junior Cup" set. This set features a smaller pitch than normal, and a single player per side. The Tipp-Kick rule book (and it seems to cover all forms of the game) states that "A team may consist of up to three kickers and a goalie, however each player may only field one kicker and the goalie at one time", and that "different kickers may be used depending on the game situation". It does not explain more than that though.

The rule-book also has adverts for a team and accessory range (in German). These include -

The teams are split into "Top-Kicker" which features Bundesliga teams, and a good range of the top sides from around Europe, and "Star-Kicker" which is a range of (at least) 46 World Cup teams, ranging from Brazil to Saudi Arabia.

Chad Valley Big League. (Early 1970s).
The BIG Football Game with real kicking players.

This was more of a rival to Striker than it was to Subbuteo, with large spring-loaded kicking players. It took a more simplified route to kicking than Striker though, with a tab on the kicking leg to allow the leg to be pulled back. The set had large simple plastic goals, and a pitch which was almost identical to a Subbuteo pitch, but even bigger. The "Big" in the title also emphasized that Big League was played with eleven players a side, rather than Striker (and indeed Subbuteo's Targetman) which were only five-a-side. Actually, the Big League box includes 25 players, so you had a few extras (or maybe you could paint a kicking referee!)

The unique selling point for Big League was that the figures were supplied unpainted, and a set of paints and a brush were also included. Another item in the set was a colour wall chart featuring the playing kits of all the English league sides of the time, plus shirts/shorts from Scottish, Irish, and some International sides, to give you a few painting ideas. This is an attractive poster, and it is interesting to see which teams got the Subbuteo treatment and which ones didn't. Of course the downside to this do-it-yourself set is that second-hand you can get some very ropey sets with terrible painting. 

I'm not sure how long the sets were produced, but there are at least a couple of slightly different box layouts and I own an alternate version to the set above. Where there is a big black space on the box lid shown here, my set has a drawing of Martin Chivers, with a "Play Big League like I do" speech bubble. The wall chart in my Martin Chivers set is dated to 1973. A bigger change between the two sets is the layout of the box interior. On the set shown above, the two teams face each other in the box, whereas the Martin Chivers version has all the players facing the same way.

The DIY nature of the painting is a downside for the modern collector, but the game also had disadvantages for a 1970s child. For starters the kicking mechanism relied on rather fragile plastic and a tiny spring, but by far the biggest problem with Big League was that there were no specialized goalkeepers. You just had to paint up a standard figure as a goalkeeper. However, that was hardly ideal, and I'm not sure how he was supposed to defend the large goals. This might be because I don't have a rule book with my set.

There was also a smaller version produced with only five-a-side teams called Junior League. This set actually had pre-painted players in blue and red kit, so second-hand players from this set are much nicer.

Super Glocagoal by Atlantic (1970s)

Atlantic were an Italian firm, best known in the UK for producing OO scale plastic soldiers. I can remember shelves full of their figures at Beatties in Brighton, and they had a much wider range of subject matter than their English rivals with Egyptians, Greeks, Wild West etc. I never saw this footie game though, and know little about it.

Looking at the way the kids on the box are flicking the players, and then looking at this blow-up of the action pictures on the box lid suggests that this game was pretty close to Subbuteo (although the ball is smaller). In Italy it was regarded as a cheaper alternative to Subbuteo.

Extra teams were sold in Italy, but these were unpainted, and simply supplied in an appropriate colour plastic. For example, the Torino set shown was dark red. The figures themselves were an OO scale version of the famous Airfix footballers set, which Airfix themselves only produced in 1:32 scale. It was common for other figure manufacturers to "borrow" figure designs from their competitors. The advantage to using the Airfix figures, is that it produces some lovely detailed figures (even if the team includes a referee, linesman and trainer!). These figures would look great alongside Subbuteo's accessories. Another amusing thing is that the goalkeeper is in a diving pose, but he's really only going to be useful diving in one direction.

Interestingly, Airfix did produce a football game in the 1970s, which was in their toy range, rather than the more famous model one. Sadly, the game seemed to be more of a two-player pinball, with the players controlling paddles on the goal line. So it doesn't really warrant a place on this page.

April 2008: New information about the Atlantic set has kindly been sent to the site by Bruno Biasini, who owns the Roma set shown above. Unlike the big set shown at the top of the section, the game at this time came as half a pitch, with one team. Bruno thinks this was smart marketing because in order to have a full game you needed to buy two sets, and he owned Roma and Lazio. The team colours around the pitch-half are a nice touch.

Here are a few bits of the box illustration in more detail. You should be able to see that the (very small) goal, and the flags are different from the "Super" set shown at the top of this section. The little score boards had a sliding marker, and went up to ten. Bruno explains that the winner was simply the first one to ten goals. The set came with two different types of ball. The "Super set shows the small round version, whereas this box shows the larger ball, which was flat on side. With the flat bases, this would have given the game even more of a shove-ha'penny feel. Of course, the best thing shown in this set is the lovely little covered bench.

That's all for this page, but look at Page Two for Cup Final, and loads of Pro-Action Football !!

• Misc. Football Games: 1950s-70s (this page); 1980s-2000s

• Super Striker Tribute - Page 1: Parker Sets. Page 2 Palitoy and Peter Pan.

• Newfooty: 1929-1952; 1953-1960s 

• Table Association Football 4-2-4

• Subbuteo Main page.

• The Illustrated Subbuteo Accessories List - (Page 1).

• The Team Colours Project  (Ongoing illustrated Subbuteo team lists).

• Subbuteo Football boxed editions, and Five-a-side and Junior Editions.

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