Floodlight Football In Preston

1920

Floodlight Football In Preston

While searching for the first night game in Football League history, I came across this interesting website:

While this website offers an interesting description of the game, there are a few notes I should make.

First of all, the match wasn’t exactly all that heavily hyped. I was able to find a few small references to it in passing on the day of the match:

From Liverpool Daily Post, December 16, 1920, page 11

From Hull Evening News, December 16, 1920, page 2

Of course, with the Football League back to normal, the erstwhile popularity of women’s football seems to have come to an end.

It didn’t take long for these sweepstakes match prediction forms to return to the papers. From Hull Evening News, December 16, 1920, page 2

The other thing is that the details of the match really aren’t clear. Some papers claimed the crowd was as large as 20,000:

From Huddersfield Daily Examiner, December 17, 1920, page 3

Others claimed there were only 10,000 attendees:

From The Guardian, December 17, 1920, page 11

In fact, even the most detailed article I could find was a bit light on the details:

From Evening Express (Liverpool), December 17, 1920, page 6

The technology wasn’t quite there yet, but it’s interesting to see that they were trying.