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Inspiration turns up in odd forms. Isaac Newton, so the story goes, needed an apple to fall on his head. Mark Haddon wanted "to take a life that seemed horribly constrained, to write about it in the kind of book that the hero would read — a murder mystery" when he wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
For some football fans it is simpler than that. A clip of Jamie Pollock's infamous own goal for Manchester City, a picture of Thierry Henry cuddling a cat, or Ally McCoist in a dubious Hummel tracksuit will do.
By 2018 three accounts in particular had turned that kind of material into some of the most loved corners of football Twitter, now X: ftbllrswanimals, Crap90sFootball and TheSkyStrikers. Each gives away hours of free time and a mountain of images and video, with no money in return. Asked why, the people behind them gave strikingly similar answers.
Footballers with animals
In spring 2018 @ftbllrswanimals had posted 2,862 tweets to 13,300 followers over nearly four years. Its owner is an Everton fan ("unfortunately", by his own account), lists Thierry Henry, "the handsome cat-cuddling man", as his favourite player, and picks David Beckham's free-kick against Greece in October 2001 as his favourite goal. His favourite game is Brazil 1–7 Germany, which he says he will never recover from. Asked to choose between Sam Allardyce and the fictional Mike Bassett, he went for Bassett.
The early influences were accounts that were funny about football without taking it too seriously, such as waynefarry, who runs TBNSport, and JonnyGabriel. "People can be guilty of treating footballers too seriously at times," he said, "this was my own inconsequential way of showing them in a different light."
There was never a grand plan beyond making a few people smile. "There's just something inherently pleasant about seeing Stuart Pearce feeding milk to a baby kangaroo," he explained. He expected the audience to top out at around 500 followers and underestimated, in his words, "the hunger for Lukas Podolski with sea lions". Posts are queued in advance and the admin done in spare moments at work, because running it live all day would be impossible. "No amount of Duncan Ferguson's pigeons could save me."
Jermaine Pennant losing at Scrabble to a dog pic.twitter.com/tiPjOSCayb
Footballers with animals (@ftbllrswanimals) April 15, 2018
He has no intention of changing the formula, though he once toyed with a podcast interviewing footballers about their pets, with Aaron Ramsey and his work for the WWF top of the wish list. The account's biggest tangible reward was a place on the BBC quiz show Pointless, where it helped him through the audition, even if he went out in the head-to-head both times. The strangest reaction came from a man in Chile, who accused him of ripping the soul out of a footballer by posting a picture of him holding a fish. The biggest change to his life? Awkward conversations at work about why there is a photo of a topless Thierry Henry with a cat on his phone.
Crap 90s Football and the VHS goldmine
@Crap90sFootball had 2,764 tweets and 43,300 followers after just over two years. Its creator supports Hull City, names the 1990s winger Neil Mann, whose career was cut short by injury, as his favourite player, and chooses Geovanni's goal against Fulham, Hull's first ever in the top flight in 2008–09, as his favourite goal. Arsenal 1–2 Hull from the same season is his favourite match; France 98 his favourite World Cup.
The spark was a three-minute clip from Yorkshire Television's Calendar, recorded by a friend in 1991. While going through a pile of old tapes for a Hull City YouTube channel before throwing them away, he found it contained three dreadful own goals, one of them scored by Wolves' Paul Stancliffe at a crumbling Molineux. It made him laugh out loud. More tapes revealed more ropey defending and comic finishing, and Twitter seemed the obvious place to share it with friends.
It grew without much pushing. He added club hashtags and followed fan accounts and journalists, but the following came organically. "Such is the nature of Twitter, if something catches the imagination then it goes viral pretty quickly," he said.
When Billy Smart became the #hcafc defensive coach.#ChesterFC #Crap90sFootball #Redux pic.twitter.com/euoP3xhpFm
Crap 90s Football (@Crap90sFootball) July 26, 2017
There have been moments close to burnout, given how long it takes to find and clip the footage, and at those points he steps away for a week or two. The reward is knowing that something light-hearted brightens a stranger's day on a platform that can be "a nasty, bile filled place". The downside is painfully practical: the account has made his VHS collection bigger, just when he hoped to get rid of it. He is grateful for clips sent in by followers and would love more footage from beyond England. Its effect on his life, he said, was simple. "It's made me laugh. A lot."
The whole enterprise only exists because so many people once pressed record on a Saturday afternoon, a habit traced in a look at the video age of football.
The Sky Strikers and 2,000 scanned programmes
@TheSkyStrikers had a far busier tweeting habit, 30,700 tweets, with 3,037 followers after a little over four years. Its owner supports St Mirren, kept a soft spot for the Parma side of the 1990s, and lists Alessandro Melli, Paul Breitner and the "glorious tanned enigma" Tomas Stickroth among his favourite players. His best live game was St Mirren 4 Celtic 0 in 2010; his favourite ground is Stranraer's Stair Park, narrowly ahead of Old Trafford. By 2018 he had scanned more than 2,000 programmes.
It started by accident. A Motherwell programme lying on the floor had an alarming photo of Willie Pettigrew in the tunnel with a mascot, so he scanned it, people liked it, and a large bucket of programmes doing nothing suddenly had a purpose. The name comes from Sky's short-lived cheerleading troupe from the first season of the Premier League. The aim has never changed: share the photos rather than leave them lost in a bucket.
His influences were RetroPunishment, whose YouTube compilations from club VHS tapes captured the humour of old football, and ScotsFootyCards, which inspired him to buy a great many copies of Goal magazine.
Older followers would know my soft spot for Brechin City stems from the best ever "Face In The Crowd" contest ever pic.twitter.com/Y0UbrVWaie
Miles McClagan (@TheSkyStrikers) June 1, 2016
That Brechin City "Face in the Crowd" photo, showing an old man sitting alone in the stand who could claim a socket set "valued at nearly 30 pounds", was retweeted over and over. Another sign that things had grown beyond expectations was being invited onto BBC Radio Norwich at one in the morning to discuss the actress Leslie Ash's role in a Norwich City friendly. The strangest message he received was the claim that "St Mirren were lucky to win the 87 Cup Final", which he regards as sheer madness.
His favourite programmes are Coventry City's 1971–72 issues, notable for a women's column called "Birds Eye View", and Bristol City in 1979–80, which featured everything from Kevin Mabbutt in a hot-air balloon to Donnie Gillies in a kilt.
Why give it away?
None of the three set out with a plan, none expected the audience they found, and none had any intention of making money. What they share is a feeling that this stuff, the animal photos, the own goals, the scanned pages, is better shared than left in a garage. Public collections work on the same principle on a far grander scale: a portrait of the Broadway singer Ethel Merman, for example, is free for anyone to use through Wikimedia Commons / Library of Congress.
For The Sky Strikers the payback was the most personal of the lot. Scanning all those programmes, he said, made him fall back in love with football.