A League of Horrors: Ten Terrifying Tales of Football Governance

A shifty-looking figure tries to sneak something past the authorities. It’s a familiar scene, not just from a public information film but from the boardrooms of English football. For a long time, the game felt strangely proud of its status, an island nation protected from the foaming-at-the-mouth horrorfest of foreign ownership models or financial ruin. But the rules on bringing dangerous new elements into the country are stringent for a reason, and a series of warnings have been issued over the years to remind everyone: rabies means death.

These cautionary tales take many forms. Sometimes they are darkly humorous, sometimes just plain weird, but they are best remembered for being completely terrifying. They are shown between the big matches, discussed in pubs and on forums, and they have left psychological marks on the middle-aged amongst us who have seen it all before.

The Blunders

Consider the short, sharp shock of a club’s sudden implosion. Produced in 1976, one memorable series focused on a fictional family of directors, characters with more on their minds than taking care while driving their club forward. It succeeded in horrifying anyone watching with the speed at which the focus switched from slightly undercooked comedy to somebody’s face smashing through the windscreen of a car. A reminder of the perils of not wearing a seatbelt, of not securing the club’s future against the stupidity of others.

Another famous series, Play Safe, was originally produced as a longer film to be shown in schools of excellence, but was then cut down for wider television broadcast. It warned of the dangers of playing near extremely high-voltage situations, like clubs operating too close to financial pylons, risking everything for a spark of glory. Its style became iconic, a template for the genre.

Building Sites Bite

Perhaps it is merely a reflection on the era’s growing interest in science fiction, but some cautionary tales are only prevented from taking a higher place on this list by the unexpected appearance of a teleporter. One such story involves a young talent called Ronald, who finds himself dying in a series of most unfortunate manners on the building site of a new stadium or training ground project. These grand designs can bite. This particular saga has been described as part of a “Holy Trinity of Public Information films” alongside two other infamous cases of youth development gone wrong.

One of those, Robbie, was a feature-length piece about a young boy mutilated in three different ways as a result of straying closer to the railway line of professional football than he should have done. Each horrifying incident was afforded thirteen minutes, a lesson for any academy. It was made as a replacement for an even more graphic warning, a film considered too much for a young audience. That film, The Finishing Line, was first produced in 1977 and withdrawn two years later. It gained infamy for being probably the most graphic of them all, depicting a railway line as the scene for an Olympic Games-style tournament which ends in numerous children getting either killed or seriously injured. A brutal allegory for the win-at-all-costs culture.

More haunting still is Lonely Water. Produced in 1973 and narrated by Donald Pleasance, this film’s bleak warnings about what may happen to careless children playing near water entered the annals of infamy. Many who saw it commented later that because it had scared them so much, they never wanted to go swimming again. It’s a feeling many a supporter has had after watching their club dive headfirst into financial peril.

Protect and Survive

It is getting difficult to separate the final contenders. There is Apaches, probably the most famous of these films, which documents the horrors of life on a farm. The name comes from the Western theme that overarches it all, as one child after another meets a grisly end, one buried alive in slurry, another accidentally drinking weedkiller. Familiarity has perhaps bred a little complacency towards this particular brand of self-inflicted disaster.

Then there is the ultimate warning, the one thankfully never deployed. Protect & Survive was a series of twenty short films produced as a spin-off from a government guide on how to survive a nuclear attack. It would only have been shown, on all channels on a loop, in the event of attack being imminent. Narrated by the late Patrick Allen, with a creepy electronic soundtrack, it offered either false hope or helpful advice to those just about to be vaporised. A fitting metaphor for the administrator’s statement to a doomed club.

But the top spot goes to the one that uses primitive special effects to turn its creepiness levels up to eleven. Never Go With Strangers plays out a series of scenes in which clubs may find themselves vulnerable to being snatched. It goes out of its way to scare the living daylights out of its audience, altering the faces of suspect owners to make them look like the devil and shading their cars in with red felt-tip pen. Once seen, never forgotten.