The bottom of the pyramid: a journey through Sunday League with Home Bargains FC

Jimmy Vaughan and his son James are discussing football in the kitchen of their home in Clubmoor, Liverpool. Jimmy is the chairman of Home Bargains FC and James acts as secretary. Both have been involved since formation as a junior side in 1988, when dad was manager and lad was player. While James, a car salesman, leans against a washing machine with a cup of tea in hand, Jimmy, a builder, is sitting opposite me. Both have been at work all day, they’ve been back an hour or so and Jimmy’s wife is busy cleaning the plates from the sausage dinner they’ve just eaten.

It is Monday night and in six days Home Bargains will play in the quarter- final of the prestigious FA Sunday Cup for only the second time. Ferrybridge Social from the village in West Yorkshire known for its three coal-fired power stations and its motorway services will be the visitors and James has been told by Ferrybridge’s secretary that they will be bringing two coachloads of supporters with them.

‘We’ve heard they’ve got a giant centre-forward and they get it forward quickly,’ Jimmy says with a nod which suggests he thinks he is letting you in on state secrets. Earlier in the competition Ferrybridge knocked out Pineapple, another Liverpool team, then in the previous round Oyster Martyrs from Croxteth – previous winners of the competition – met the same fate in Yorkshire.

‘Some of the Oyster lads were quite vocal on social media afterwards, saying Ferrybridge didn’t play any football and their pitch was a bog,’ Jimmy continues. ‘This will be their first away game – they’ve been lucky with the draw because we’ve already won games in Newcastle and Nottingham. We’ll try and get it down and pass. But we’re a Liverpool side; we know we have to win the physical battle first.’

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James is itching to speak. He is 36 and does not play any more – describing himself not only as the secretary but the team’s ‘fourth-choice goalkeeper’ in moments of desperation. Being on the touchline does not make him any less passionate, though. In one of the earlier rounds he was travelling around Australia. So desperate was he to keep a check on the team’s progress he sat in a bar with Wi-Fi refreshing his feed every couple of minutes to see the scores on the official FA Sunday Cup Twitter feed.

‘The competition is regarded really highly in this city,’ James says. ‘Last week we had twenty watching on the line. On Sunday there will be three hundred at least. People are interested. I go away on holiday with lads from Huyton. They play for The Eagle. They’ve been telling me, “We’ll be there next Sunday.” If you’ve played amateur football for any length of time, everyone knows each other and everyone knows which players and managers have won the National Cup. There’s a fella called Billy Edwards and his three sons play for us. Billy won the National Cup with The Eagle in 1983. He still talks about it now, always reminding us that no current team would stand a chance of beating The Eagle. The National Cup, it’s the pinnacle for us. In Liverpool it’s like the Super Bowl.’

Aside from London, no other city has a history like Liverpool in the FA Sunday Cup. Between 1979 and 1983, Merseyside’s domination was absolute with The Eagle being joined as champions by clubs with names like Lobster, Dingle Rail and Fantail – the team that Accrington Stanley’s John Coleman and Jimmy Bell played for before entering the Football League through non-league. The next glory period came a decade later, and in the five years between 1989 and 1993, Almithak, Nicosia and Seymour lifted the trophy. Since 2011 there had been three Liverpool winners: Oyster Martyrs twice and then Campfield. Across half a century of Sunday league football, indeed, thirteen FA Sunday Cup winners have emerged from the fields on the banks of the river Mersey.

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‘To reach this stage, it makes us very proud,’ Jimmy interjects, reminding me that the last time Home Bargains were there, in 2014, they lost to eventual winners Campfield. ‘At the moment, we can say we’re one of the best eight Sunday league teams in the country. There’s not many players who can say they have a winners’ medal. Imagine if we do it . . .’ Jimmy’s mind trails off because he is thinking about football’s importance, not just in terms of outcomes like results but the experiences it has given him. His thoughts are laced with concern because he thinks amateur football on Merseyside is not what it used to be.

‘I played for Wavertree Town Hall in the Liverpool Sunday League,’ he recalls. ‘There were fifteen divisions and every game would have a referee. It’s down to two divisions now. This was in the 1970s. Sefton Park was another breeding ground. On a Sunday morning you couldn’t find a space on the grass. There was one changing room, one sink and no showers but the facilities didn’t matter because everyone loved playing football. Now there’s no football being played on Sefton Park whatsoever. The same has happened in Kirkby.

At its height in Kirkby [there] were four different leagues and several divisions in each league. Fantail were from Kirkby and they had a winger called John O’Leary. Bobby Charlton said in his autobiography that John was the best amateur he’d ever seen play the game. I had to mark John one day when I was seventeen years old. “That’s him there,” one of the older players told me, because John’s reputation went before him. This little chubby fella waddled out of the changing room. But I couldn’t get anywhere near him.’

Jimmy says his passion for football is ‘like a disease’. When he stopped playing, something remained inside him – an urge to wake up on a Sunday morning knowing there was a game to prepare for. Home Bargains started as St Brendan’s Juniors. James went to Cardinal Heenan, the same high school as Steven Gerrard. One of the parents had links with Trinity Mirror and for a long time St Brendan’s had the Daily Mirror as sponsors. Home Bargains FC was formed when one of the parents called into each of the stores in the Old Swan area of Liverpool looking for new backers. Tommy Morris, from the famous Scotland Road thoroughfare that leads into Liverpool’s city centre, had opened Home Bargains in the Swan as a 21-year-old in 1976 when takings were less than £100 a week (though it was called Home and Bargain originally). Morris persevered and it wasn’t long before the customers were flocking, enticed by the prospect of buying brands they recognised from other shops and the adverts on TV but selling at a lower price. Forty years later, there were 370 stores nationwide with turnover in 2014 of just under £1.3bn.

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An early customer had been comedian Ken Dodd, who would often make the trip from his home in Knotty Ash to stock up on life’s essentials. Legend has it he would often rummage to the bottom of the toilet-roll basket to make sure he got the biggest roll for his money. Dodd had a connection with the shop – one of the players’ parents was his postman – and so it became easier to persuade him to present trophies at the end-of-season awards ceremony, which was always held at the Garfield pub (now a Wetherspoons rebranded as The Navigator).

‘Tony, the postman, said at a committee meeting, “I deliver his letters – I can get Doddy to come along.” I said, “OK, Tony, if you can – that’d be brilliant,”’ Jimmy remembers. ‘Tony then called us on the morning of the presentation. “Doddy’s coming, he’ll be there about one o’clock.” I didn’t really believe him. We got the presentation under way and next minute Ken Dodd marches through the doors with a bunch of tickling sticks. We couldn’t get him off the stage! He took the microphone and started singing “Happiness”. The whole place erupted!’

The memory prompts James to release an enormous laugh. ‘We’ve always tried to get footballers or celebrities down for the presentation evening because it means a lot to the kids,’ he says. ‘I knew some of the cast in Hollyoaks and Brookside and they helped us out too. Phil Olivier [Tinhead] was one of them. Tranmere Rovers were always good to us. They sent players over. Les Parry was the physio and he was very helpful when he was there. If one of the Home Bargains players got injured Les would let us use Tranmere’s facilities. We’d be sitting there on the treatment table next to John Aldridge and Pat Nevin. It was great. You could never get anything off Liverpool or Everton. I can understand it, because so many people are asking for so much off them. They can’t cover everyone. Maybe they could have done more.’

Jimmy’s interest in playing teams from other areas did not start with the FA Sunday Cup. As juniors Home Bargains would travel to Butlin’s for the weekend to play friendly matches in towns like Harlech and Pwllheli. ‘Our plaques are in pubs around north Wales,’ he says proudly. With age, as the juniors turned into teenagers then young adults, the challenge became different. To ensure Home Bargains had enough players, Jimmy would drive to the famous 051 nightclub in Liverpool’s city centre at 2 a.m. every Sunday to ‘round up the lads’.

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‘They’d all pile into the back of the van and come back to ours and kip on the floor,’ he smiles. ‘They’d wake up groggy but at least we had a team. The problems came a bit later as they got older. Liverpool is a city of sheep so if a couple of lads do something, they all do it. They’d all go out on a Saturday night and I’d receive calls at five a.m. with one of them on the wind-up. “We’re not coming!” I wasn’t laughing along though.’

With players like James getting older at the same time, Home Bargains, which has teams under their banner all the way down to under-8s level, have been forced to look elsewhere for new blood in their senior side. ‘The original gang are coming to the end now,’ Jimmy sighs. ‘One is now the manager, Anton Paul. I talked him into it a few years ago, because he wasn’t so keen on taking the job at first. We’ve now got a few non-league players who aren’t on contract with their clubs, which means they can play on a Sunday morning. Carl Peers is with Bootle. Mike Grogan plays for Marine. Dean Shacklock plays for Skelmersdale. We’ve also got John Couch, who was with Cammell Laird for years. Tom Owens is another one – he’s doing very well at Witton Albion and they are near the top of the Evo-Stik First Division. Tom was meant to be going to live in Australia after Sunday’s game with Ferrybridge. Witton have said to him, “If you stay until the end of the season we’ll reimburse the cost of the flight.” That shows you how much they think of him. It helps us too. ‘Ten to fifteen years ago, more non-league players were playing Sunday football than there are today,’ Jimmy continues. ‘Now, many of the non-league clubs have players on contracts and that means they are forbidden from playing for anyone else. The lads that aren’t on contract, they’re being asked to train twice a week by their club then play on a Saturday.

The boundaries of the non-league have stretched in the last decade so that means players are travelling further for away games. The non-contract lads are absolutely whacked by the time it comes to Sunday and it is stopping them playing. This has driven standards down because the better players are going where the money is and they aren’t able to play on a Sunday where they used to do it for the enjoyment. Football is a lot more serious at every level than it used to be.’ James agrees: ‘Our lads have improved with their discipline but we still see a lot of hostility towards referees. We live in a more aggressive society now. If you go out on a Saturday night, clubs are open until eight or nine o’clock in the morning. Years ago, you could cope with lads turning up hungover because two a.m. was just about manageable if you had six or seven hours’ sleep. But you can’t cope with drugs if that’s what they’ve been up to all night. You get a sense that some lads are trying to prove themselves. Five or six years ago the trouble hit a bit of a low but things have improved because “going out” culture has taken on different times. Instead of getting home at two a.m., a lot of lads are going out at two a.m. It means it’s impossible for them to show up for an eleven o’clock game on a Sunday morning. Gradually, that has weeded the troublemakers out.’

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Jimmy tells another story: ‘The old Coach and Horses, a pub that used to be on Lodge Lane – it’s gone now – used to play Croxteth Legion, and you couldn’t move in Sefton Park. It was heaving with people watching. The Pink Echo would come down and report on what happened. It was north Liverpool versus south Liverpool. You’d get fisticuffs. But at the end, everyone would go to the pub and have a pint. It has calmed down a bit in recent seasons but for a period, it was, “I’ll come around to your house and blow your windows out.”’

‘A lot of the younger lads in our team don’t even drink after games,’ James reacts. ‘Even when we’ve won, we’ll go into the pub and they’re all on Lucozade. Lads care about their appearance more now than they did before. They’re obsessed by gyms and fitness. Gym culture has gone huge. It has affected the age of the people involved in amateur football. Because more and more players are really fit, it puts the older fellas off because they don’t fancy running around after Usain Bolt all morning. This doesn’t mean standards have increased, though. The players might be fitter but do they understand the game? I think a lot of young players are missing out on the type of guidance I received from the older fellas when I was their age.’

‘It means that veterans’ football has become very popular,’ Jimmy says. ‘The older fellas still want to play but they don’t want the hassle of running round after kids – kids who have been doing God knows what the night before and are in the mood to prove themselves. Three veterans’ teams use the same pitch as us, the over-35s, over-45s and the over-50s. They’re all very competitive.’

Jimmy and James are talking between themselves now. I am listening. ‘We’re fortunate that in our team, we have the right balance of lads when it comes to age and I think that explains why we’re more successful than other sides where they have younger more energetic players but don’t always know what to do with their energy,’ Jimmy continues. ‘There’s a good mix of fellas in their early to mid- thirties, a handful in their mid to late twenties and then a couple of teenagers. The youngest lad, Peter Mason, is seventeen years old and his dad played for us previously. Peter’s been watching us since he was six.’

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James: In recent years some of the Liverpool leagues have tried introducing under-18s and under-21 leagues. I think that’s upset development as well because kids end up playing in a bubble for longer than they used to and it disrupts their development into adulthood. This is the FIFA generation: if there’s a bump on the pitch or the ball isn’t pumped up as much as it should they’re whingeing about it. You still get a few off the street but we’re finding more and more that the expectations are a lot higher. They show up on a Sunday morning with their hair done and their best gear on. They don’t like it when their white trainers get a bit of dirt on.

Jimmy: The Premier League has too much power. If Liverpool have a one o’clock kick-off on a Sunday, four or five players go missing. Players ask if we can kick off at half-ten. We can, but then you have the issue of making sure everyone is awake and able to turn up. Also, the away team might be Evertonians, and so they turn the request down – knowing they’ll have an easier game.

James: A lot of players have to work six days a week. If you’re getting paid double-time at a weekend, you have to take it because there’s a mortgage to pay. You’re under pressure. Lots of the lads are self-employed, so can they take the risk getting injured at a Sunday match? In ten years, I don’t think Sunday league football will exist. Honestly. Three teams in our league this season have disbanded already. Nicosia was one of them. They were two-time winners of the National Cup.

I ask what they think made Liverpool a hotbed of football talent in the first place. James responds first. ‘The passion for football and the passion for drinking ale,’ he says. ‘Pubs used to give teams money. You’d have the name on the kit. All the lads would pile back to the pub, put money behind the bar on ale and then the pub would supply a buffet. There are fewer pubs these days, a lot of them have closed and the ones that are open are surviving by serving food. They’re trying to attract families in rather than a boisterous gang of lads on a high after winning a football match. We used to drink in the Garfield but the first week it became a Wetherspoons the message was clear: “We don’t want you here.” We weren’t their type of clientele, they thought we’d be too noisy.’

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Jimmy and James are grateful to Home Bargains, ‘supportive partners’, who contribute £1,000 a year towards kits and annual pitch fees. The sum is small change when you consider how much it costs to send a side around the country playing in a national cup competition.

‘It was £800 to get to Newcastle and £550 to get to Nottingham,’ Jimmy says. The teams share the travelling costs and you win £300 for each round you get through but it takes ages to receive the winnings and you’ve got to pay the fees up front, including the officials.’

James has seen a change in the way the competition is scheduled. ‘In the earliest rounds you don’t go past Manchester for a game. I think the authorities like to regionalise it because the Liverpool teams are so strong and there’s a possibility if they were kept a part, you’d get four Liverpool teams in the semi- finals every year and eventually the rest of the country would lose interest.’

‘Social media has become a part of the routine in recent years,’ he adds. ‘I deal with our Twitter feed and the other teams are always trying to wind you up. It’s only a bit of banter really but I don’t think it’s wise to react because you’re asking for a fall. The team from Nottingham were called Attenborough Cavaliers. They were bragging on Twitter, saying they were unbeaten for four years. It’s a bit embarrassing when you end up losing 4–0 as they did to us, isn’t it?’

‘We went to Newcastle in the round before last and the hospitality was great, there was chips, barms and curry,’ Jimmy adds. ‘Geordies and Liverpudlians are the same type of people. They invited us back to their pub, which is something we always do, win, lose or draw. The Newcastle team were said to be unbeaten – yes, another one. We were right up against it because we had to leave Liverpool at seven-thirty on a Sunday morning for a one o’clock kick-off. It was in December so a lot of the lads were at Christmas parties the night before. We were driving round West Derby dragging people out of bed and it meant that we went there five players short of our strongest team. It went to extra time and somehow we managed to pull through.’

Two years ago, Home Bargains played a team from Huddersfield. ‘There were shouts of, “You robbing Scouse bastards”,’ James remembers. ‘But we’ve learned to be disciplined. In the Sunday Cup, they appoint a higher standard of referees, but sometimes that disrupts the game because Sunday football is very different to professional football. It’s not always a case of refereeing a game – it’s knowing how to manage it, the ebb and flow. The referees are up-and-coming and looking to climb the ladder and they know they’re being assessed. If you give them mouth they’ll send you off. We always say to our lads, if you’re going to complain do it with a smile. We’ve still got a couple of grumps who should know better but we’ve improved.’

‘I always tell the lads, “If you complain to the referee, always do it with a smile,”’ Jimmy says. ‘Christ, I’d hate to get knocked out because one of the lads had lost their temper. James calls this potentially winning the Super Bowl. For me, it’s the Holy Grail.’

On the Brink; A Journey Through English Football’s North West, (deCoubertin) is out now. Link: www.decoubertin.co.uk/onthebrink