Football changes but never the excitement going into a new season

Summer has always been a difficult time to be a football fan. Nearly three months without the familiar cycle of games home and away, weekend and midweek. That hasn’t really changed in the last 50 years, but plenty of other things have.

Once the World Cup or European Championships had ended, and your almost-complete Panini sticker album had begun to gather dust, there was little to occupy a football obsessed kid like me in the 1970s.

There were the visits to the club shop to buy the glossy prints of any new signings. I would put these on a board on my wall and add pins below the player each time one scored during the season, long before stats websites existed.

Of course buying replica kit was not a thing then; home shirts for sale did not really come in until the 1980s. And even if it had been, you would not have needed a new one every summer. The classic Bukta blue and white for example was used for a couple of seasons at the very least.

There were also the Shoot magazine ‘League Ladders’, where you tracked the position of each club via tiny cards on a perforated insert that came free with the July issue.

That too went up on the board in anticipation of the new season. Amazingly, these are still made and available on Etsy for those looking for a retro, analogue experience.

Once pre-season training began, anyone could of course make their way up to Waterhall and watch, grabbing a few autographs either side of an unpleasantly sweaty packed lunch.

It was a low-key and informal precursor to today’s annual one-off open training session at the Amex, and a world away from the state-of-the-art and very private training facility the players enjoy at Lancing.

I thought of that at the final Robert Eaton Memorial Fund match at the Amex last month, sitting a few rows behind my childhood idol Peter Ward.

I must have got his autograph all those years ago at Waterhall. Still, why didn’t I bring my autograph book to get the great man’s signature half-a-decade on?

There were pre-season friendlies of course, possibly the occasional one against a First Division side looking to stretch their legs against lower-league opponents.

Now it is a televised summer series in vast US sports stadiums against our Premier League peers, before the now customary final warm-up at the Amex against La Liga opposition.

The transfer window had not been invented then. Fees were yet to top seven figures, a number first broken when Trevor Francis joined Nottingham Forest for £1 million in 1979.

A couple of years earlier in the summer of 1977, Mark Lawrenson had signed for the Albion for £100,000 from Preston North End. That seemed like a lot.

Now we look forward to £30 million Brazilian striker Joãa Pedro Junqueira Jesus scoring goals for us at Anfield and Stamford Bridge, whilst asking £80 million to £100 million for one of our Ecuadorian midfield stars.

The new season always arrives though. It was the end of the long, hot summer of 1976 when my family literally spilled out of an oven-like car onto the baking, shade-free terraces of the Goldstone Ground for the first game after a long drive from wherever we had been on holiday.

Inevitably, we ended up in the first aid hut under the North East corner floodlight pylon, with me trying to follow the game through the window as my sister threw up into a bucket through heat exhaustion.

I would not swap the padded seat, shade from the roof and readily available bottled water (no lid) of the Amex for those days at the Goldstone.

But I do hope today’s nine and 10–year-old fans are building the same summer memories of their club and its players, even have times have changed hugely.

Who knows what the club and the game will be like 45 years from now? This summer it is all about the US tour, the new kit, new signings and the prospect of European football, with the Albion living the dream in the biggest league in the world.

Warren Morgan @WarrenBHAFC