‘I just thought it’d make my mates laugh’: ‘Crap 90s Football’ up for national award

FeaturesNews
Written By Rick Lyon

James Richardson

By Nick Quantrill

The unexpected things that happen to us in life often start from small decisions we make, things rippling outwards and creating something tangible before we know it.

It’s something James Richardson, the curator of Twitter’s @Crap90sFootball feed knows all too well, as his passion project will take him to London next month to attend a prestigious football awards ceremony.

Perfectly conceived for a medium that places a premium on short, sharp content, @Crap90sFootball does what it says on the tin. From strikers missing open goals, to goalmouth scrambles that defy physics and logic through to goalkeepers making kamikaze dashes from their line, all football life is here.

“I started posting clips in March 2016”, James explains. “The genesis of the account was a handful of clips that came back-to-back on a Goals on Sunday tape I had with Hull City highlights on. I’ve been running Tiger Tube, a Hull City YouTube video archive since 2009, so I’d accumulated quite a lot of these tapes, and I thought, maybe before it was lost to the ages, I should just give it one last look.

“There’s a lot of Hull City on @Crap90sFootball, as we were very bad in the latter half of the decade. Maybe that sharpened my eye to some of the worst elements of it. I just thought it’d make my mates laugh, but I didn’t really have anywhere else to put it.”

James isn’t wrong about the Hull City aspect. One popular clip, and a personal favourite for James, shows the team locking horns with Macclesfield Town in 1999 with 30 seconds of the ball not leaving one area of the pitch, a futile arm-wrestle for territory. It’s indicative of a time period fans of a certain vintage will remember all too well.

More widely, an audience quickly developed with certain clips going viral. Some of the material will be familiar to seasoned football viewers, such as Jamie Pollock’s classic headed own goal for Manchester City and the epic goalmouth scramble between Norwich City and Sheffield United. Other clips have reached former players themselves.

“One of the earlier ones to reach out was Lee Dixon, who scored a fairly memorable own goal when he inadvertently chipped David Seaman from near the halfway line,” says James. “Inevitably with social media, you post something with a moderately famous person, they get tagged into it. He took it in good part, though.

“The lower-league players seem to laugh it off and take it in the spirit it’s been posted, really. After that, people started to contribute their own clips. I’m really fortunate that are people like me who archive their own cub and preserve it. I’m very grateful people do that and send it on. It’s nice that people are happy to contribute.’”

Closing in on 150,000 Twitter followers, it’s maybe that sense of community that explains why it’s such a hit, with the goodwill it generates not lost on James.

He says: “I’m not big on analytics, but I do know the average age of people viewing is those in their thirties and forties, which is where I’m at. With middle-age, you do get a bit nostalgic and wistful looking back at things.”

Football was certainly changing in a fundamental way, not least due to the success of Euro 96 on English soil. For James it explains why he believes @Crap90sFootball works and has such a loyal following.

“There was a wave of enthusiasm for football at that point,” reflects James. “It doesn’t matter where it was, clubs were churning out videos and trying to maximise what money they could make out of it. Football was portrayed as a really glossy product, certainly at the top end, but when you dug underneath that, it certainly wasn’t.

“What I’m doing is maybe a nice counterpoint to where the Premier League is now. The shabbiness of football back then before all the branding and corporate stuff really does strike a tone with people. Maybe it feels a bit more real than what we’ve got now. Plus, there’s something primal about the slapstick nature of much of the footage that can’t be ignored. People falling over will never not be funny.

“Growing up through the 1990s with things like blooper tapes, Nick Hancock’s Football Nightmares and Baddiel and Skinner, looking at the funny side of football was ingrained in me.”

@Crap90sFootball has certainly caught the imagination of Twitter users and it will certainly continue to grow, not least as James has been nominated for an award at the prestigious Football Supporters’ Association Awards, bagging a short-listing in the Online Media category. It’s the largest supporter-led awards in the UK with hundreds of thousands of votes cast every year.  

“It couldn’t have come as a bigger surprise,” says James. “It was a little heads-up from someone, so I had a quick look, and it was right. In my category, I’m up against The Athletic with over a million subscribers and Football365, which is one of the foundations stones of online football media, so it feels very surreal.

“What I do is lo-fi and I’m a one-man band, but it’s really lovely to be involved and I’m grateful to be nominated. A lot of people have been very kind and warm with their congratulations. I didn’t expect it to last longer than a couple of weeks, never mind six years, but there’s always more to find.

“Maybe with lockdown, people have gone through their stuff and sorted it for upload. For me, the Holy Grail is just the stuff you’re not aware of and that suddenly comes on to your radar. Even six years into the doing this account, it still feels like there’s so much out there to find.

“I’ll carry on because it’s still fun for me to look at old footage.”

Become a Patron of The Hull Story. For just £2.50 a month you can help support this independent journalism project. Find out more here

Rick Lyon
Previous

The King is back: Elvis tribute show coming to Hull’s Bonus Arena
Next

‘Xi’s power grab creates a classic dictator’s problem - he’s more likely to make mistakes’