Search 000’s of images of vintage footballers and teams of yesteryear and purchase photographs and gift items with the chosen images
How to search:
Type in the name of a footballer or football club or year
(N.B. for more comprehensive searches click on a club tag or enter words into the Advanced Search box at the bottom right of this page)
The Hero of Vintage Footballers:
Elisha Scott
1912 – 1936
Liverpool, Belfast Celtic, Ireland
Cross divide hero, Ireland’s perennial, Liverpool’s longest…
Welcome to Vintage Footballers! Since inception in 2014 we have been developing a photo library to enable you to view and purchase images and related products of a huge variety of footballers. We offer images of thousands of pre First and Second World War footballers and football teams, the chance to enlarge them in various sizes, and the opportunity to buy a variety of bespoke designed products related to their image, from coffee mugs, fridge magnets and t-shirts to pretty much anything you want us to make.
We hope you find viewing the images of these men interesting, innovative and adventurous and that the site helps you to see them and the game of football in prior decades in a way you’ve not seen before. You may be a football historian, you could well be a family descendant looking for memorabilia of a footballer in your family’s history, you may simply want fantastic pictures of classic players of the past.
This website continues to be inspired by the huge number of relatives with footballers in their families a few generations before who have bought items through Vintage Footballers. Families are proud of their past achievements and associations, and are keen to have images of their antecedents in their prime, both as individuals and as part of their club or national team. Those achievements, many decades later, still help to shape identities, associations, and give reason for pride.
We hope that you think the site is impressive and we welcome your feedback and your input. We welcome your corrections to factual inaccuracies in player biographies. We believe we can provide something that is useful to lots of people, fun for many, and we look forward to welcoming you back to the site on a regular basis. There is a lot more content that we are developing for the site, so please if your footballer isn’t listed, contact us as we will probably have a photograph somewhere! We also have a Facebook page under the title Vintage Footballers where we’d love you to LIKE the page and leave comments, and also to SHARE our articles of interest on your own Facebook page.
Footballer Images
A word about the images, it’s really important… Many are excellent considering their age, typically between 80 and 120 years old, taken with cameras that are miles behind the quality that we take for granted in the modern age. Some images are worn and some are not all that clear, some are as good an image we have of a particular player, they may be the only image we have or even to anyone’s knowledge that there is, so for that reason we have sometimes chosen to publish photographs that aren’t as good as we’d like them to be, in particular of players whose career was brief.
Some photographs of this age are inevitably damaged, blemished, creased, infested with white and black spots when viewed close up, and we go to enormous lengths to clean them as best we can to produce the best image possible. You will see we deliberately use above as a background image a postcard of Preston North End, approximately 110 years old. This has not been cleaned up and the blemishes are numerous!! We are often working with difficult substrates that refuse to clean easily. Sometimes the image we are re-producing is itself heavily pixillated. Please do not expect images to always be perfect, especially as often the original images we are reproducing are extremely small! Note also we can adjust images at your request. If there is a name and club we can often remove it, if you don’t like the colour tones we can soften them, etc.
When ordering and choosing enlargements you must consider the quality of the images and how they will look when blown up to a larger size. A good way is to “full screen” the image on your computer. If at all you are not happy with a particular photograph you’d like to order, please tell us and we can work further on it (which we always do when we get an order). Since this business started our techniques for cleaning photographs have improved as has our equipment! We can now get photographs to expand without losing much if any image quality, even if on your computer screen the image you see doesn’t expand well. But please forgive us when unfortunately the image is less than perfect. It’s often a case of “you should have seen it in the first place!!”.
Please also note that while our images are all 4-sided, their proportions vary from square to highly elongated for full length portraits, with many dimensions of rectangle in between. When printed they will fill the widest length or width of the advertised paper size, so for example a 12 x 18 elongated portrait will be 18 inches high. However it is likely there will be “trim” on two sides of an image unless its dimensions fit exactly. When we produce framed images, this trim is normally removed.
Also the original images are often incredibly small, believe it or not, and if you saw the originals you’d be amazed at the result and understand how good they look considering they’ve been blown up 10+ times!! We are very proud of our image library, an incredible amount of work has gone into it, and we hope, with your help, to make it better. Please note that sometimes there may be a big difference between the date at which the image was published and when it was taken, we try where possible to estimate the date where it was taken if indeed it seems obviously different to the publication date. We also try where possible to identify the exact match or date an image was taken if there is enough evidence to make a judgement. We welcome assistance or correction if we’ve got it wrong, which is occasionally inevitable. Most importantly, all of that said, we hope you enjoy viewing them and reading the biographies of the players, which we have written in as many instances as possible by researching the players in as much detail as practicable. We welcome further information or corrections if we have our facts wrong.
We try to feature many on our Facebook Page, please see below and click to go there. Feel free to LIKE the page and SHARE images and articles of interest to your own Facebook account, or to blog about players on the Vintage Footballers page, TAG people in a comment to draw their attention to any articles of interest… we love to hear your opinions and memories. Dealing with families in particular has so far produced several wonderful, sometimes uplifting, sometimes poignant stories. Helping people is part of the satisfaction behind operating the website.
Please note our delivery times on image purchases, whether on gifts or simple framed or unframed prints, are typically 10-14 days on top of the production time, so if you want to receive purchases in time for a specific date such as a birthday or for Christmas, you should order well in advance or contact Vintage Footballers to discuss the expected production and delivery schedule for your chosen items, or special delivery options if you’re in a hurry.
Meantime, should you want to email us, please feel free to do so at enquiries@vintagefootballers.com.
