11 Symptoms of the Teamsheet Virus

What lies beneath the good, bad and utterly bizarre match day graphics?

You know the drill…

A club official fires up a tweet, adds the matchday teamsheet graphic and hits send. Like any contagion, the teamsheet virus thrives on repetition. The multiplier effect of a 46-game season (plus cups and friendlies) for 72 EFL clubs means there are close to 4,000 graphics per season.

Some of them, I will go as far as to say, aren’t that terrible. But many more — and the vast majority — are either mad, bad or just downright ugly. It should be straightforward: 11 players in an order that people can easily read and understand. Yet it rarely is.

The straws have long blown off the back of this desiccated, broken camel. Nonetheless, I found time over the summer to scream into the uncanny valley when my team listed our goalkeeper halfway down the teamsheet.

CB, AM, AM, RW, LB, GK, CB, ST, ST, RB, CM

This experience, heartfelt and true, sparked what can only be described as a sweeping and somewhat hysterical investigation into the nature of what I perceive to be a dangerous epidemic.

11 Symptoms of the Teamsheet Virus

#1 — Typography

At the most basic level, a teamsheet should be readable. To read something – say, a sentence such as this – you need letters printed one after the other. Forget the spelling; I’m talking about letters as individual communicators of meaning. It’s primary school stuff. At least, it should be.

Our first example comes from the second city. Earlier in the season, Birmingham City published a teamsheet in which the anatomy of the individual letters — your serifs, spurs and curlicues — was so disfigured as to be unreadable. Imagine Stavsfielᵈ as a young pupil trying this out in a handwriting test. He would’ve flunked it.

Sorry, Blues, for picking on you first. But the writing was on the wall: