Rothmans was a name to remember but changes in football could kill it off

There is a new theory, probably devised by researchers at one of the newer universities, that you can tell the approximate age of British sports followers by how they refer to what began as the Football League Cup, a competition that has gone under 10 different names in the past 38 years.

Some of us resolve the problem by referring to it hardly at all. But if it’s anything, it has to be the League Cup. And in refusing to mention the sponsor du jour, I would say we are doing football a favour. Nothing damages a sporting institution quite so much as a name change.

This week it was announced that the 48-year-old Sky Sports Football Yearbook would cease publication unless a new sugar daddy can be found. If the name means nothing that is probably because it is still known to most of us as Rothmans, a name that disappeared when tobacco advertising was banned in 2003.

We could pause here for a joke about Rothmans themselves being killers, though I prefer to think that the book was really named after Benny Rothman, the once-reviled-now-revered old leftie who led the mass trespass in the Peak District (and was duly jailed) in 1932 to open up the grouse moors to ramblers.

Of course the internet has played a part; it does that. It certainly helped do for David Wallechinsky’s quadrennial Olympic history, last published in 2012, which was reaching a size so massive it could have been used in the weightlifting. But sports annuals were dying off long before the net took hold. It was guiltless in the loss of Rothmans’ oval-balled brothers covering rugby union (1972-2000) and rugby league (1981-98) and has a cast-iron alibi for the failure of John Wisden’s Rugby Football Almanack (1923-25).

Stats books don’t generally get reviewed or passed from hand to hand or picked up by book groups. The rugby Wisden’s cricketing big brother (1864 to date) made itself talked about by adding trenchant and independent comment when Victoria still reigned. This was hardly an option for anything under the aegis of Sky Sports, an organisation that dislikes its commentators even calling a game dull and is so dominant in English football that an article on virtually any aspect of the game – except maybe Whither the Offside Law? – would run up against its commercial interests.

Though it could not save Wisden’s long-ago dip into rugby, the distinctiveness of the name, known to people who know nothing else about cricket, has been a major factor in the almanack’s success. It wouldn’t have lasted long, as the Australian Murray Hedgcock once wrote, “if the founder had been John Smith, Jones or Robinson” (Rothman might have been OK.) Nor if his successors had kept rebranding it as Capital One or Carabao.

This has resonance far beyond publishing. How are Arsenal supporters going to describe their match-day destination once the oil money runs out? The stadium has only ever had a sponsor’s name. This problem regularly arises whenever the vagaries of capitalism dictate the end of longstanding sponsorships so successful that they have been inextricably linked with an event.

Gillette made itself synonymous with one-day cricket in the early days of the genre. Then the company did some research and decided consumers were starting to associate it with cricket rather than razor blades. After 18 wildly successful Lord’s finals it pulled out in 1980. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the much-loved county knock-out tournament thereafter began a slow but inexorable decline.

Two of jump racing’s biggest events used to be the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury and the Whitbread Gold Cup at Sandown. No one can remember which bookmaker sponsors either event now and both occasions have lost a fair chunk of their resonance.

One might also argue that tennis’s Miss Chris Evert damaged her brand by spreading confusion and changing her playing name to Mrs Lloyd. However, one can also see that now-fading custom in a more romantic light as a sign of devotion and commitment. Or one might do if the marriage had lasted. Or indeed her next two.

One of the problems with Rothmans/Sky was that the book became hobbled by changes in the game itself. The beauty of the old positional charts, showing who played where on the field in each club lineup from game to game, was ruined by tactical fluidity, mass substitutions and, above all, squad numbering.

There was also a lovely column listing each club’s managers since recorded time began. A single column can now do no justice to, for instance, Notts County’s 71 changes (I think). They almost need a book of their own. And the editors never quite found a satisfactory way of dealing with the wholesale promotion that came after the founding of the Premier League in 1992 whereby the Fourth Division instantly became the Third. Then it was all changed again with the invention of the Championship.

This was in line with the era’s general obsession with title-inflation whereby club secretaries, town clerks and the like all became chief executives and editors became editors-in-chief etc. But in football it is a confusion and irritation that still bedevils any discussion of a club’s history. Or any reading of Rothmans.

One fears more such books will be casualties, even without name changes. Ruff’s Guide to the Turf (founded 1842) seems to have followed the sport’s traditions and been shot silently behind a screen. And tThe well-established Playfair Cricket Annual and the Cricketers’ Who’s Who must be on the threatened species’ list. But there is one remarkable survivor.

The Athletic News Football Annual was founded in 1887 and lasted 59 years. It morphed into the Empire News and Sunday Chronicle annual and then the News of the World and then the Nationwide. And it still stands. Use it or lose it. Memo to publishers: try not to change the name again.