Dialling for Goals: following the Blades in the pre-digital age
Before push notifications and less-than-accurate social media updates, our writer remembers Club Call in all its delayed and imperfect glory
Brendan Moffett
Reading the recent excellent piece in The Pinch on those unpolished VHS season reviews of the 1990s brought back my own memories of Blades content from the analogue age.
Long before push notifications, live blogs and instant goal alerts, there was Club Call. For younger fans, the name might mean nothing, but for many of us ‘vintage’ Blades, it was a lifeline – expensive, clunky, but utterly essential if you were following the team from afar in the 1980s and early ’90s.
Club Call was a premium-rate telephone service, charging by the minute to deliver news, gossip and, most importantly, live updates. Updates were recorded on tape and uploaded with delays – sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes longer. It was never instant, but when you were desperate for news, it was everything. I seem to remember that the Sheffield United Club Call line was 0898 800 1889.
As a Blade living in London, I depended on it. Nights out in the West End were punctuated by discreet trips to the payphone, coins in hand, dialling in for updates from the Lane or whichever ground we were playing at.
One night stands out in particular: 31 October 1989. United were chasing promotion under Dave “Harry” Bassett. In a Covent Garden pub, I kept slipping away to check the score. By full-time, Club Call had us losing 0-1 – a damaging blow to our early-season momentum. I took the tube home in a downhearted mood, convinced our early-season promotion hopes were in tatters.
The next morning at Finsbury Park station, I picked up The Independent. Flicking straight to the sports pages, I discovered the truth: two late Peter Duffield penalties had turned it around. United had won 2–1.
That was Club Call: part lifeline, part lottery. A transitory medium, sitting somewhere between the certainty of classified results and the digital flood that was to come.
It was part of the evolution of football media. Before it came Ceefax (page 301 for results, if memory serves). After it, the rise of radio phone-ins like 606 with Danny Baker, the rolling coverage of Sky Sports News in the Premier League boom, and then the internet: official club websites, early fan forums, live score sites, and finally the all-consuming churn of social media.
Now, we carry the game in our pockets. Push notifications, real-time stats, heatmaps, highlight clips within seconds of the final whistle. The delay, the uncertainty – all gone. Football coverage has shifted from a world of scarcity to one of abundance.
But abundance doesn’t always mean quality. Too often, the loudest voices are clickbait rumours, toxic outrage or unqualified opinion. The challenge today is no longer access to information. It’s filtering the noise to find the truth.
Back in the days of Club Call, we paid through the nose for information that was delayed and imperfect – but it was scarce enough to matter. Now, in an age of endless content, the real skill increasingly lies in knowing which voices to trust.
I can’t remember if it was Clubcall pre-90s, but my first experience of it was as the Bladesline in the 1992-93 season when my uncle, probably highly irresponsibly, told the then number (0898 888 650) to a then 10 year old me that was living in the Midlands. From barely any news available to me, there was now a number that seemed to be a semi-daily source of Blades gossip and rumour.
It’s as 1993/94 kicked in, and the frantic Bladesline intro was replaced by Dave Bassett’s intro welcoming everyone to Clubcall, that I can vividly remember being sat down by my dad and shown a BT phone bill for the first time. With the summer of 1993 not providing enough daily reassurance on Brian Deane’s future through the media available to me, Clubcall filled the void – daily Deane updates, which after the shock of my favourite player being sold, led to daily Deane-replacement updates.
I don’t remember the exact amount, but being presented with the pages of itemised calls, marked by highlighter pen, with a total that I will only describe as a ‘three-figure sum’, it moved from Clubcall to wake-up call.
All premium numbers were immediately banned. My uncle was probably given his own talking-to. Jostein Flo’s signing had to be revealed to me via the 312 News-in-Brief part of the Ceefax football pages.
Hey Brendan, that's a tale that's going to stir some recollections amongst more seasoned supporters. I can clearly remember at some time in the early 90s our financial director at the place I worked having <<a word>> with me and the company owner at a board meeting about our climbing phone bills. Turned out the three most dialled numbers in the previous quarter were the Leeds Utd line (Paul, the boss),Blades Club Call (me), and the Liverpool line (Allan - the FD himself). We shared a slightly embarrassed laugh, then said no more about it. Don't think it had any impact on reducing our spending...