Programmes

Match day programmes have been around since the birth of rugby league.  In the case of Rovers, we believe the first season as a senior club in 1921 was also the first year of publishing programmes but none have ever surfaced as far as we know.  We do know for certain that other clubs were publishing, including Bradford Northern who were Rovers first opponents on 27 August 1921.  The programme for this game is owned by the club and you can find it here.  The earliest known home programme is from a couple of seasons later in February 1924 against Hull which you can also find on this site here. This is the only example of a Featherstone Rovers home programme from the 1920s that we know about so whether they produced for every game we don't really know.  If you have, or know about, any other examples please do get in touch.  By the early 1930s the supporters club based at the Junction hotel were producing the programme an arrangement which continued until the mid 1960s when the club took over.  

The  match day programme was both a useful source of income and a way of communicating with supporters.  When you look through programmes from the different eras you get a flavour of what issues the club management were dealing with (usually the finances or lack of), player comings and goings and how the team was performing.  You can also see the different types of businesses who were supporting the club through advertising and sponsorship.

With the new digital era resulting in the growth of social media and instaneous news all forms of paper publications have been in gradual decline.  In 2018, following a change in Rugby league bi-laws, Rovers moved away from the traditional match day programme and produced a small fold over publication akin to an advertising flyer, as the traditional programme was losing money.  This lasted only a year before in 2019 the club stopped any form of match day publication.  With smaller print runs now much more economically viable it is possible the programme could reappear but this will very much depend on the willingness of the club to do so.

                                                                                                                         The last ever regular traditional match day programme?

On this site you will find a vast array of programmes (over 2,300 and counting) from all eras.  This includes every pre-war programme (home and away) we have managed to get hold of, either from the clubs own archive or various private collectors.  Recent additions are 21 home programmes from the 1933/34 and 1934/35 seasons when the economic depression in the area was at its height and the future of the club was in real jeopardy.  We are now only missing 13 post-war home programmes from the site.  Every away programme we have up to the start of the 1980/81 are now on the site.

 If you have any programmes from the pre-war period, any home progarmmes or away programmes from before 1980 which are not on the site please do get in touch. 

 Every programme is scanned in full so you can read cover to cover here and reminisce.