Welcome to Subbuteo is Great

Out of nothing it popped into my mind..., at my brother's attic there must be some subbuteo teams lying around. Not used for many, many years. I remember how we played with unstable and difficult to control figures on a wrinkled cloth field. My mother remembered we played on the carpet of my bedroom. It wasn't our favorite game. The teams of small men in colors of Ajax, Feijenoord and the Dutch national team were beafitull. Years later I read that these type of Subbuteo figures were called Zombies and were terrible to play with.  

We prefered to play real football outside on grass, on the street, or at Oranje-Wit, a local football club in the town where we grew up.

Oranje-Wit D1 (1982?)

But the promise of playing our own football matches at home was very appealing. Especially in the early 80's. My older cousin thought me how to play a similar football game with marbles that I actually liked more than Subbuteo. When the home computer era began, we could play football on the Atari.  

 
Pele's Soccer (1981, Atari 2600).

On the Atari home computers I played Kick Off with my room mates. Kick off is the best football game ever. It was very fast game; aplayer could run down the entire field in 5 seconds.

Kick Off 2 (Atari ST, 1990)

The years of Atari home computers were also the years when I started to learn computer programming by myself. Written in Stos Basic, I made a football manager game called World League Soccer. The game was in public domain, but I sold 3 copies of the source code to fellow Atari users in the UK. And later came PC and PlayStation games with impressive graphics, gameplay and statistics, like Championship Manager and the FIFA and the Winning Eleven (Pro Evolution Soccer) series. 

The attraction of Subbuteo remained forever. I started to research if Subbuteo had survived until the 21th century. I expected that in England and Italy the game was still played. To my surprise, new pitches and players with improved quality existed. I asked my brother to find our old subbuteo teams and wrap them as Sinterklaas presents for me. In return, as a present for my 6-year old nephew I bought a Lego football stadium and created figures for my brother to play as our childhood favorites DS'79 from Dordrecht.

Lego Football team of DS'79.

I read about the different new picthes, the old and new playing styles and decided to buy a Zeugo pitch at Astrobase in Italy. Together with metal goals and keepers. Trying to avoid the frustrations from my youth with broken goals and keepers. As a child I did not have any painting or wood working skills, let alone patience. Looking at all the great stadium people have made in the past and present, I wanted to try to make a simple but decent quality table for my Subbuteo pitch. And with my software engineering and electronics skills I wanted to make an Arduino scoreboard.

Do-it-yourself Subbuteo table made with MDF wood.

On Ebay and Martkplaats I bought teams of different brands like Zeugo, Soccer3D and Paul Lamond Subbuteo. I wanted to find out what type of figures was the most fun to play with for me, my family and friends. Assuming they would be minimally interested to give it one try. To get my ex-wife's support and enthousiasm I'll include a imaginary team from her old neighbourhood in Lima, Peru. I planned to make a Subbuteo version of our Hattrick team Atletico El Agustino.

2014 Champions of Hattrick Division VI.655: Atletico El Agustino.

How a Subbuteo player of Atletico El Agustino could look like...

It took me a while to learn about the differences between the figure types and the naming used on the internet nowadays: old style subbuteo, modern style playing, total soccer... I've put my learnings into this table that might help people to recognize types.

The first renewed Subbuteo game we played was situated on the diner table. The zeugo pitch has a advantage that in can be carried around and put on different surfaces and stored again. The bottom layer is made of a kind of rubber and the upper part feels like cloth. The diner table was large enough. Corner flags are in place. Referees are ready. Lighting is checked. The goalskeepers are selected, Teams are warming up and we are ready to play...

 
Our first game with the Zeugo pitch on the diner table. 

The Zeugo pitch lays quite flat on our table. 

With Tipp-Kick flood lights....

Because the big table was not convenient to carry around and occupied too much space I made a smaller table with lighter type of wood and original subbuteo fenches from the Manchester United 2000/2001 Edition set.

The game of subbuteo offers possibilities for a lot of accessoires in the scenery around the pitch of in the game. I made an automatic robot goalkeeper with an Arduino for shooting practice.

In 2018 I travelled to Brasil. During a 3 months sabbatical I managed to find a job as a programmer of medical software. I decided to start a new life in Brasil. Knowing that brazilians love football and everything related to 'futebol'. I watched some table soccer videos on youtube, discovering that in Brasil they play with plastic buttons of around 5 cm. I was very lucky to find and join a table football club in the neighborhood. They played button soccer (futebol de botão) and also subbuteo, sectorball (from Hungary) and chapas (from Spain). Renato Barthez introduced me to many modalities of table football, explaing rules, differents techniques and strategies.

To promote table soccer we played demonstration matches at a college, shopping center, the shop of our sponsor (Mulek de Rua) and at the Legends Cup, in the Morumbi stadium in São Paulo.

We played various tournaments. In our home town of São Paulo and also in Rio de Jaineiro.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 we made video interviews with all team members of our club.