Update – July 2021

Research and work on the early years is going well and we’ve started conversations with the Rugby club in terms of what we can do together to celebrate their (and technically, our!) 150th anniversary next year. We’re hoping we can work more closely with the Rugby club in future, particularly as we share a common origin, so we’ve been looking at some of the earliest reports from 1872 and 1873 to see what we can find. We’ve uncovered reports and line-ups of around 20 games so far so its been quite fruitful…We will publish our findings in the near future so that the Rugby club can include anything we’ve found in their promotional material. Not quite sure I quite understand the scoring mechanisms of a “quarter-way” or “rouge”…but they might!!!
Turning to Association football and the history that we’re more accustomed to, we’ve managed to finish reviewing the Visiter archive for the year 1892, so that is now complete in terms of results, line-ups and reports…and so we move onto 1893.

The missing reserve results for 1948-49 have now been added which means there is a complete record of Reserve and A team results for the football league period 1921-1978.
We do have goalscorers for all of the games but haven’t added them yet…We also have a few seasons worth of line-ups but it isn’t a complete record and more will need researching.

Focus for the next few months turns to our second Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
The intention had always been to run the hall of fame ceremony on an annual basis and after selecting a larger group of 10 to open the hall of fame we had planned to reduce the number of inductees in each subsequent year so as not to dilute the prestige associated with it. However with plans for 2020 having had to be shelved due to the pandemic we’re going to “catch-up” in 2021 with another 10.
We set the bar high in 2019 and it’s going to be difficult to beat what was described on the night as “one of the best club events ever held” but we’ve got some great new ideas, a brilliantly engaged committee working on the event and we’re thoroughly looking forward to it.
Now that the fixtures have been released and the restrictions eased we have agreed a date with the club. The committee has met and agreed upon the next group of inductees and after confirming their availability, the date, and the legends to be honoured will be revealed in due course.

As with our first hall of fame class, this year’s class is also suitably representative of the whole history of the club and not weighted more in favour of one era over another.
It was once again difficult to narrow down the candidates but we have chosen 3 pre-war stars, 3 from the football league period and 4 from post football league, all of whom thoroughly deserve their places, making an impact and name not just for Southport, but in many cases on the wider game and also the local community. With a few thousand players having represented the club over the past 140 years there are many many more who we all agree are hall of fame worthy for future years!