On 3 October, Ian Laschke’s English League Football: The Complete Record will be published, providing an in-depth account of over 120 seasons of English professional football. Since the league's founding in 1888 with just twelve clubs, it has grown into the structure we know today, encompassing four divisions, with the Premier League at the top since 1992.
Laschke’s new book compiles the results, league tables, and match dates for every season in the Football League’s history, bringing this extensive information together in one volume for the first time. It also includes each club’s top goalscorer for every season, along with insights and details that have never been published before.
Laschke is a football statistician with over fifty years of experience. His first book, Rothmans English Football League 1888-78, was published in 1979 and set the stage for this more ambitious project. Reflecting on the long process of researching and writing his books, Laschke shared how it began with a search for Wolverhampton Wanderers’ results: “The journey to the completion of English League Football: The Complete Record has been long and varied. It all started with me writing to various clubs in an attempt to collect Wolves results. The responses were not at all helpful as no clubs seemed to keep records. The more difficult the task became, the more determined I was to get some answers.”
Laschke recounts his visits to the Newspaper Library at Colindale, where he pieced together match results and league tables from the early years of the Football League: “I managed to obtain a copy of The Story of the Football League from a local library, and this provided the results and dates of all Football League matches played up to the end of the 1937/38 season but with no proper league tables. Armed with this information, I set about producing the league tables and results sheets as laid out in my first book.”
He credits sources like the Rothmans Football Yearbook and the English National Football Archive for helping him cross-check data from later years. With the advent of online archives, his work became easier, but his commitment to accuracy never wavered: “Everything needs to be checked, and Tony Brown and the excellent English National Football Archive have been quality sources of additional information and verification.”
Laschke’s attention to detail and years of dedication have resulted in a comprehensive record of English league football. English League Football: The Complete Record will be a valuable reference for football statisticians and a unique resource for anyone interested in the history of the game.
English League Football: The Complete Record is available in hardback and softback versions.
