Welcome to Gary James’ Football Archive

Guess Manchester City’s FA Cup Final Shirts

In the mid 2000s we set up a FA Cup final display as part of a special exhibition at the Manchester City Experience (the original club museum set up in 2003). We managed to borrow shirts from several star players and their families with the only City FA Cup finals missing being 1904 and 1933.…

Sam Cowan’s Often Incorrectly Reported Quote

Manchester City’s 1930s captain Sam Cowan is often reported to have said something like ‘We’ll be back next year’ to the King when City lost the 1933 FA Cup final to Everton BUT this cannot have been true. So, here to spell it all out is the story… City reached the FA Cup final in…

Manchester 1840-1919 (Part Two)

Every Monday I’m posting a section from my book ‘The Emergence of Footballing Cultures: Manchester 1840-1919’. It tells the story of the origins of men’s football in Manchester and discusses the birth of both City and United plus the clubs that predated them such as Hulme Athenaeum, Manchester AFC, Birch etc. Today’s section is the…

Joe Mercer OBE

Today (9 August) is both the anniversary of Joe Mercer’s birth and the anniversary of his death. He was born in 1914 and died in 1990 and I spent several happy hours visiting him in his final years. I also wrote his authorised biography in 1993 (updated in 2010). In 1965 Joe Mercer became Manchester…

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About this Website

On this site you will find articles, posts and other material about football. Some of this material is free to access (select ‘Free Content’ from the menu above) while other material is available to those who subscribe to the site. 

The site was launched on 1 January 2021. Since then hundreds of articles, interviews (audio & written), history talks and both my PDFs of my first book (From Maine Men To Banana Citizens, published 1989 and out of print since 1990) and the 2010 edition of Manchester A Football History book (this originally cost £24.95 and has been out of print since 2012) have been posted.

To get a feel for the volume and type of article available visit the ‘Search The Archive’ page (or use either the search function at the bottom of this page or by selecting a category in the Posted Content Categories field below).

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