Legs Eleven: Controversy in table football

You never know which subjects are likely to grab the attention. When I wrote about the Subbuteo table football world championships in July last year ("Flick When You're Winning"), the article sparked off a whole load of communication and some enthusiasm for arranging an international competition among the tourist hordes in summer. Armed with the knowledge that table football has the power to spark off discussion where the minutiae of corruption trials might not (there should after all be some priorities in life), here I go again, but this time not about Subbuteo but table football itself - a game I previously dismissed as being "crash-bang-wallop" compared with the finesse of Subbuteo flicking.

The table football world championships have recently been held in Nantes, France. The men's champion was a Belgian, the women's a Dane; Slovakia and Germany were the top-ranked nations among, respectively, the men and the women. Spain were second among the men, and Great Britain figured only in the seniors category, being rated second.

Like many sports, table football is not immune to its share of controversy. It isn't of the order of Blatter's machinations at FIFA, spot-fixing in cricket or dwarf-tossing in rugby. It is altogether more fundamental. Who actually invented table football?

The generally accepted wisdom has it that one Harold Searles Thornton, on having been to see Spurs play, came up with the idea. This may not say much for the style in which Tottenham were playing in the early 1920s (though they did win the FA Cup in 1921), but Harold was either so impressed or unimpressed that he patented his game in 1923. It seems only right. The English invented proper football, so it should also be the case that they invented the table version.

But then, maybe the English didn't invent football. Sepp Blatter, for one, has questioned the fact. And when it comes to table football, there is another pretender to the invention crown. Two in fact.

The International Federation reckons that it was all something that came from central Europe, without being specific. The Spanish Federation, however, claims that table football was the work of Alejandro Campos, who took out his patent in 1937.

Campos was nothing if not versatile. He was variously a tap dancer and a newspaper editor. He also changed his name, becoming Alejandro Finisterre, apparently after the name of the town where he was born, though many a Brit would assume that it was after a location on the shipping forecast (which Finisterre was, but had its own name change to avoid confusion with Spain's Finisterre peninsula).

Fourteen years separated Harold's patent from Alejandro's later one. So how is it that Alejandro has come to be heralded by the Spanish where Harold has not been heralded? Separation has everything to do with it. What Harold did was to create players with their legs together, Alejandro had the legs separated.

You may have come to appreciate that legs are quite important when it comes to football, be it the real thing or on a tabletop. I confess to never having taken much notice of whether the legs of table football players are bound together or are apart. I would suggest that this isn't a detail of the game that attracts much interest by anyone, but doubtless it now will do. Is the table football in the local bar a Harold or an Alejandro?

The difference may go some way to explaining why Spain are any good at football and England aren't. Were a real footballer to ape Harold's style, he would have to hop. Translated onto the tabletop, the legs-bound player can do one thing only - and that is to welly the ball as hard as possible, i.e. in keeping with how much English football has traditionally been played. Legs apart, on the other hand, lend themselves to two-footed players in the real game and to the Spanish exponents of "tiki-taka" (an expression largely credited to a commentator, the late Andrés Montes); table football in Spanish is also sometimes referred to as "taca-taca".

Alejandro's fame is set to spread. He is the subject of a book by the Italian cartoonist and novelist Alessio Spataro. What it is called I don't know - "Standing On My Own Two Legs" perhaps. There is no novel about Harold as far as I am aware, but maybe he should be more celebrated. 1923 was a momentous year for English football. The first Wembley final and the famous white horse. But was it a real horse? Amidst the hopping Bolton and West Ham players there was the Escalado horse of the 1923 Cup Final. And who invented Escalado?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.