Ah, Subbuteo! I absolutely loved this game when I was a
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| Above, Subbuteo 1982 World Cup Leaflet. Click for larger view |
kid, and thanks to some of my collection turning up at my sisters house a few years ago, I love it again.
This world cup was a first for the new 'Lightweight' Subbuteo teams which had been designed for the 1981 range, replacing the disliked 'Zombie' teams which had existed briefly in the late 70's.
Going right back to the 1966 World Cup, Subbuteo always made an extra effort in producing specially packaged qualifying World Cup teams.
In anticipation of the 1982 finals, Subbuteo issued a series of 'World Cup 1982' teams in special 'Window Boxes' to mark the occasion. The 1981 catalogue makes reference to this along with a list of teams which would be issued in these boxes.
Of course, as this is 1981 Subbuteo still don't know who the 24 qualifying teams will be, so they hedge their bets with the following selection (The number in the brackets is the catalogue reference number):
Austria (10), Argentina (67), Belgium (21), Brazil (50), Bulgaria (152), Canada (41), Chile (68), China (149), Czechoslovakia (231), Denmark (225), England (329), East Germany (18), Finland (18), France (164), Greece (18), Holland (13), Hungary (281), Italy (166), Japan (2), Luxembourg (231), Malta (1), Morocco (158), Mexico (157), Norway (231), N. Ireland (320), Portugal (281), Poland (39), Peru (159), Republic Of Ireland (331), Rumania (160), Switzerland (114), Scotland (318), Sweden (162), Turkey (133), USSR (161), USA (271), West Germany (156), Wales (330) and Yugoslavia (149).
This adds up to 35 different teams (notice the duplicate reference numbers on teams like East Germany, Finland and Greece (18)).
Once the final 24 qualifying teams were known, Subbuteo then issued another set of boxes. They were styled in the same way but this time had 'World Cup Team' on the front and a Spanish flag motif on the corners.
This introduced 4 new teams to the Subbuteo range which had made it to the World Cup for the first time and hadn't featured in their previous range. These were Algeria (402), Cameroon (403), Kuwait (404), and Honduras (405).
Also, Belgium changed their away strip to their home strip which created an extra team (151).
Above: The two styles of World Cup 1982 boxes (Rep. Of Ireland and Spain shown)
I had a Scotland World Cup 1982 team at the time, which came in as runner up in my school class' World Cup tournament (losing out to Peter Toon's Northern Ireland).
When this team resurfaced from my sisters loft I set about trawling Ebay in an attempt to collect all 40 of these teams.
Click here to see my collection so far.
Find out about our annual tournament in Leicester here.
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