Norwich was a struggling club that didn’t have many good players in their ranks but one player that would consistently score for the Canaries in my tenure was Kenny.
This led to me being phoned on a daily basis to be asked whether I would part with Kenny Irons as other managers (such as the Blackburn manager) were very keen to harness Kenny’s goal-scoring talent in a more suitable team.
I never gave in to the bids and I think my experience as a manager was better for it as I built my journeyman team around King Kenny and led them to mid-table mediocrity!
My tenure as Norwich manager was as part of an amazing Play By Mail (PBM) game called Soccer Supremos which swept playgrounds by storm in those glory days of the 90s. Play by mail literally meant that I would complete my team sheet by writing the names down each week and picking tactics followed by any other instructions or messages that I wanted to convey to my team or other managers and then once I was happy with what was decided I would head to the Post Office and get a Postal Order for the weekly sum of £1.65 and place that in my envelope as that was how much it cost to play per week.
Add to that a stamp and for the best part of £2 per week, I was able to take part in one of the most exciting things for an 11-year-old to take part in. Kids in the playground were managers of other teams in my game world and it was so much fun to chat Soccer Supremos each week with them whilst trying to broker deals.
The best bit though was a week later receiving your results and news sheet for that week. It really was an exciting opening of a letter as you peeped at your results sheet very slowly and saw that you’d lost 3-2 but Kenny Irons had bagged a brace (which meant that your landline would be receiving many calls from managers requesting to do swap deal plus cash for Kenny’s services!)
My mum would often answer the phone in the kitchen and shout upstairs,
“Rich, the manager of Birmingham City is on the phone!”
In a world where the internet didn’t quite exist in every home, this was the closest we were to a sports MMO. It was ridiculously exciting every week and I look back fondly to when I was manager of Norwich on a regular basis.
There were actually times when I went on holiday to such exotic places as Bognor Regis and Isle Of Wight and I would have my address changed with Soccer Supremos for those two weeks to the address of the holiday rental that my dad had rented out for our summer hols just so that I could continue managing my team. These truly were glory days!
Over time the Play By Mail games went out of existence with some of them transferring to Play By Email but it was never the same as receiving that envelope on your doormat every week.
Fast Forward to 2023 almost 30 years after I first discovered Soccer Supremos and I stumbled across the Re-Launch of Soccer Supremos and also the Soccer Supremos Twitter account. It would appear that the legendary play-by-mail game is being relaunched by the original founder of Soccer Supremos in a digital format. To say I’m excited is an understatement and I am really looking forward to what this will look like in 2023!
As a bonus, Mr Soccer Supremos has sent me the original Soccer Supremos rulebook to drool over (in PDF format but I can still smell the paper in my memories).
If you fancy getting involved in the renaissance of the legendary Soccer Supremos game then head right over to the website and follow the lovely guys @SoccerSupremos
“THERE'S ONLY ONE KENNY IRONS!”
Fantastic stuff 👏. Really enjoyed reading it.
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