A game of football … from 1932


Jurryt van de Vooren is pushing back the historical record of the notational analysis of football.
His latest discovery was for a game played in Delft on 1 May 1932.
It is a record of a game between Delfia Hollandia Combinatie (DHC) and Goudse Sportvereniging (GSV).
My research indicates that this was an amateur game of football but I will need to check this with Jurryt. It is an excellent possession map that indicates where each possession ends in each half of the game.
I will return to this notation as soon as possible but I am keen to share Jurryt’s discovery. One line of enquiry I will follow now is whether Charles Reep’s and Neil Lanham’s notations used a similar approach in their early days of recording games.
The 1932 game notation has a record of where possession was won and lost as well as a time (within 1 minute) stamp by each half of the game.


For a more recent discussion see this Clyde Street post.

3 COMMENTS

    • Thank you, Harold. I apologise for the terminology. I did not see either team listed in the National Championship for the 1929-30 season … and made the assumption that the game was not part of the Championship.

  1. Hi Keith, I’m no fan of football at all, so I really don’t have a clue when national championships started. All this was in the middle of the pre-WWII crisis so it might be that at the time championships were mainly local. The cities of Delft and Gouda are quite close so this might be an indication that that was indeed the case at the time. Wikipedia is not clear on that too https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voetbal_in_Nederland. I only see that the Dutch Football Association (KNVB) became a serious business around 1954. So that hints in the same direction.

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