‘This is more than Subbuteo’: A day with the best table footballers in the world

It’s the firmly established anthem for calms before sporting storms — but what’s the maximum number of times you’d want to listen to Intro by the xx in a single day?

If your answer is “a dozen, easily”, I may well be experiencing the Sunday of your dreams. It’s two minutes and eight seconds of calm. The storm? More than 300 players from 26 nations descending on the 168th-biggest town in England for the World Cup… of Subbuteo.

I arrive at Tunbridge Wells Sports Centre with an open mind but one lingering doubt: is this just Warhammer for full-kit wankers?

It’s almost 30 years since I recall last stepping on one of my brother’s beloved Subbuteo figures yet the sensation remains crystal clear in the memory: the dreaded mini-clunk of innocent, generic, 1990s outfield players being separated, career-endingly, from their ankles by a 12-year-old’s heel.

The rage generated by that act of vandalism goes some way to explain the immense sub-cultural affection that remains for Subbuteo.

Its story began here in Royal Tunbridge Wells, 78 years ago, when Peter Adolph placed an advert in The Boy’s Own paper offering a mail-order “replica of association football, played with 22 miniature men, ball and goals”, promising “all the thrills of real football!” Having been denied the trademark for the generic name of Hobby, avid ornithologist Adolph turned to the Latin name for a type of small falcon called the hobby: subbuteo.

Before he had even manufactured the first set, he’d received orders worth £7,500 (the equivalent of nearly £250,000 today). Just over 20 years later, he sold his concept to toy company Waddingtons for a sum that would now be worth £3.5million.

With 300,000 sets of players sold every year at its peak, Subbuteo became the original “unboxing” craze, with dozens of conveniently generic kit combinations available (Port Vale could simply become Spezia, or Japan transform into Cowdenbeath, should the occasion demand it). Scenery-completing accessories included stands, floodlights, scoreboards, paramedics, match officials and, inevitably, VAR.

It was accessible, in every sense: this wasn’t a board game with pages of instructions or a strategy game that needed your imagination. You could physically propel a realistic football around a realistic pitch by flicking realistic players wearing whatever colours you’d chosen and, if fortune would have it, put it into the back of a realistic goal net.

By the start of the 1990s, Subbuteo was being played by millions worldwide, from bedroom floors to international tournaments, and there were even attempts to have it included at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona as a demonstration sport. Those attempts, reported the north-east of England’s Sunday Sun local newspaper the previous year, were thwarted by the “two foreign activities” of Basque pelota and taekwondo.

You would be forgiven for assuming Subbuteo had settled into a nostalgic afterlife of dusty ‘man caves’ and abandoned Facebook groups, an ornamental fusion of model railways and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. For the past three decades, it felt like there were more celebrities posing with Subbuteo sets for football-adjacent marketing purposes than normal people actually playing with them.

David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and Angus “Statto” Loughran using Subbuteo as a visual prop (Matthew Ashton/EMPICS via Getty Images)

All that time, though, a global community of deadly-serious Subbuteo players has maintained itself, powered not by flimsy nostalgia but natural, human competitiveness. Since 1992, the global game has operated under the watch of the Federation International of Sports Table Football (or FISTF, its acronym pronounced as elegantly as it looks) and, while ‘Subbuteo’ remains common shorthand, the rules and equipment have evolved.

The primary difference between the international-standard game and the classic Subbuteo sets of old has been the phasing out of the lightweight, rounded bases of the figures, in favour of flatter, heavier models. Subbuteo purists lament the death of curling the old bases around an opponent with an artful flick but, otherwise, the modern manifestation of sports table football — never to be confused with foosball, of course — remains true to the spirit of the original concept.

GO DEEPER

48 hours at the foosball World Cup

Outside of the Subbuteo bubble, looking in, it’s an unquestionably curious scene. What other global, biennial sporting event that gathers the best of the best in its discipline could find itself going from Rome to Tunbridge Wells to Paris within two cycles?

It is 12 years since the Subbuteo World Cup was last held in the UK, when Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium stepped into the breach after the initial host, Greek capital Athens, failed to fulfil its obligations. This time, as the promotional material felt understandably obliged to point out, Subbuteo was truly “coming home”: Tunbridge Wells, as the only bidder, was awarded the tournament two years ago with the FISTF Board’s “full confidence in England’s ability to deliver a first-class event”.

Tunbridge Wells Borough Council declared themselves “over the moon” when host status was secured, but I am reminded of Subbuteo’s under-the-radar existence as I escape the pouring rain and enter a sports hall hidden away at the back of the complex. “Please do not urinate in the showers, sauna or steam room,” says a piece of paper sellotaped to the wall in the changing rooms, a worryingly comprehensive list of places to remind people not to urinate.

Four indoor tennis courts under a sweeping, sloped roof are commandeered this weekend by the tournament organisers, the English Subbuteo Association (ESA). A network of 48 elite-standard tables has been swiftly assembled by a team of volunteers, including a quartet of “show tables” framed by an impressive camera and lighting rig, allowing for the multi-angle video coverage that will be streamed on Twitch throughout the day.

“This has been two years of planning,” says Stewart Grant, the ESA’s media and communications director, whose role is more hands-on than you might think: as I speak to him, he’s setting up the speaker system over which he will spend the next 11 hours or so booming out table numbers, refereeing assignments and the occasional, “COOOOOME ON YOU ENGLAND!” He’s a Subbuteo collector and YouTuber, so there were existing layers of enthusiasm here, but there’s an extra spring in Grant’s step as the world’s best players descend on the birthplace of their game.

“Well, there are a few of us that lay claim to saying, ‘Let’s do it in Tunbridge Wells’, and I’m one of them. It was my idea, and I will fight the other two people to the death.”

The FISTF World Cup scene at the Tunbridge Wells Sports Centre (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

Grant, a lovely man with uncontainable energy, has thrown himself into his ambassadorial duties. The BBC has been here to interview him, as have national newspapers, their curiosities piqued by the quaint details of players having their flicking fingers insured for deliberately ludicrous five-figure sums and the England team’s sponsor, Weetabix, laying on a “finger physio”. And if there’s one lesson from the pre-tournament, mainstream-media cut-through, it’s that the word “flick” has versatile pun potential.

For a world championship that can fit itself inside a sports hall, it feels like the Subbuteo World Cup has gone above and beyond. The Twitch coverage, with the occasional frozen moment, is a triumph, voiced on the commentary table by Australian veterans’ team member Hugh Best, who has flown over from Perth with both the name and the sustained, controlled enthusiasm of a sports announcer. By my estimate, he provides about nineteen hours of commentary across the two days, making sure to explain any technical details to new viewers, while the Twitch channel’s chatbox fills up with reassuringly deranged allegations of FISTF corruption, thinly-veiled xenophobia and one person simply observing, “indescribable flicking, tbh”. On this evidence alone, Subbuteo has made it.

And if something exists, it is legally required for there to be a podcast about it. In step brothers Jack and Will Target, who record several episodes of Flick It To Win It across the weekend, providing a level of analysis that would put mainstream football podcasts to shame. Even for a Subbuteo novice, the chat is reassuringly sport-like: things are “nicely poised” for the knockout rounds, “Belgium–Portugal will be very interesting” and Singapore’s win over Scotland has blown their group “wide open”.

The commercial side of things feels devoid of cynicism: sports equipment company Mitre is announced as the official match ball supplier, while the merchandise tables sell both the expected fare (programmes, hoodies, retro Subbuteo sets) and the less expected (Subbuteo-branded cooking sauces). The closest we get to a “game’s gone” moment is when members of Team England are asked to move their chairs away from the periphery of the show tables area because they are blocking the sponsors’ logos on the livestream.

(Adam Hurrey/The Athletic)

I arrive on the Sunday morning for the team World Cup, which — despite a natural inclination to find out who, specifically, is the best in the world at flicking a tiny ball into a tiny goal with a tiny football figurine — I am assured is the main event.

“Would they rather win the individual final or win the team event and lose the individual final?,” Grant asks himself, but he knows the answer already. “Without thinking, they all say, ‘I want to win the team event, that is the one’. Because it’s all for one.”

Well, trying telling that to the world No 5 Dimitrios Dimopoulos who, on this very floor the previous day, collapsed in tears of joy, piled upon by his Greek team-mates, having beaten Belgium’s Justin Leroy in the final of the men’s individual event. After his 2-1 win in golden-goal extra time, Dimopoulos tells the Twitch commentators, not implausibly, that it’s “one of the best moments of my life”.

In the women’s event, a living legend of Subbuteo had some unfinished business.

Delphine Dieudonne, from Belgium, is a phenomenon. She won her first World Cup in Paris in 1994, at the age of 14. Nobody else, male or female, has won the world title more than three times. Dieudonne has 13 of them, winning all but two of the previous World Cups she had entered. The team World Cup? Eleven of those, too.

But a new wave of talent has arrived. Thanks to the FISTF switching to a two-year tournament cycle, and the 2020 event being cancelled amid the Covid-19 pandemic, it had been seven years since Dieudonne was last world champion.

Italy’s Eleonora Buttitta, defending the title she won in Rome in 2022, sails through the group stage, conceding just one goal, forcing Dieudonne into an extra play-off round. They finally meet again in the final, where Buttitta prevails, 3-2.

The main playing area, fenced off to the mere mortals of Tunbridge Wells, is known informally as “The Pit”.

Welcome to hell? Not quite, unless you have a phobia of polyester and/or men from Gibraltar screaming in your ear. Spectators — both dedicated and casual — find themselves leaning on the outer railings, like at a non-League football game, and the chatter is virtually identical: the odd wisecrack for the benefit of anyone in earshot, an impressed “Phoof!” when a ball is rattled into a top corner from the Subbuteo equivalent of 25 yards. The occasional local dad tries to explain Subbuteo to their puzzled child as they stroll around the perimeter.

The throng of the group stages makes it hard to decide where to focus your attention: Singapore vs Greece is here, Spain vs Australia there, Portugal vs Northern Ireland over there. Each match consists of four separate, simultaneous games: if you win your game, your nation gets a point in the match (these scores are updated in real time, Ryder Cup-style, as soon as someone takes the lead or is pegged back). The team with the most points when the time runs out is awarded the game and, since a single goal can change an entire match, many of them go right to the wire. As the clock ticks down on a giant flatscreen TV, various nations’ senior team members prowl between their tables, urging one of their quartet that “We need a goal!”

A Maltese player’s decorated calves (Adam Hurrey/The Athletic)

For anyone approaching this event with a football-wired brain, Subbuteo has some welcome parallels with the real thing. Players appeal for corners in familiar style, claiming a fingertip save from the goalkeepers, who are deployed on the end of a long rod poking through the back of the goal net but can be temporarily replaced by a regular figure should someone feel the impulse to play out from the back. To mirror another ultramodern footballing trend, every save is celebrated in its own right and usually met with a brief, #classytouch fist-bump from the opponent they’ve just denied from close range.

Brazil, who finish bottom of their group, score just eight times in their 16 games of the team event, yet bring a highly appropriate energy to their goal celebrations (a gleeful lap round a table almost takes one of their number straight into the stunned face of a wandering local spectator). One Italian seems to have his palms permanently raised to his shoulders in “I didn’t touch him, ref!” mode. A French reserve player patrols his team’s four tables and offers the universally-understood double hands of “Come on, raise it!”

In one football re-enactment too far, perhaps, Greece put everyone behind the ball after going 1-0 up against Portugal:

There are comfortingly footbally names everywhere you look: Brazil have a “Barthez”, the Dutch have brought a player called “Rinaldo van Dijk”, Australia’s squad has, erm, a “Robert Green”.

Between sessions — matches are 15 minutes each way, before the tables are reallocated to the next match — my mind starts to wander to working out which possible pairing of nations here would be the most “final group game of a FIFA World Cup simulcast on ITV4 while the higher-profile other match is on ITV” (I settle on Tunisia vs Japan). Later on, brilliantly, yes, the Japanese delegation are lauded for leaving the venue spotless.

A massive thank you to Japanese players and team, who took on the task of tidying the venue without question or being asked. Thank you so much and thank you for being here with us🙂 #Subbuteo. pic.twitter.com/l7qD2wqlNY

— The Eland Cables FISTF World Cup 2024 (@FISTF_WC) September 22, 2024

Unsure where the real drama is among the flashes of colour and releases of goalscoring passion, I go in search of the quintessential, cross-sectional Subbuteo World Cup experience. On table nine, it’s Brazil (figures painted in the style of Sweden, excellent) vs Scotland (Netherlands 1974, fine), refereed by a man from Gibraltar and featuring the Subbuteo accessory of everyone’s dreams: the orange Adidas Tango ball. Scotland’s Andrea Andreoni is in the process of calmly dispatching Marcelo Lages Ramalhete, a man 528 places higher in the world rankings but who, crucially, does not have Andreoni’s secret weapon:

(Adam Hurrey/The Athletic)

In a game of millimetres, in which it’s forbidden to touch an opposition figure, this cultivated deformity can be the difference between keeping possession and giving it away. Once I have overcome the (perfectly civilised) taboo of asking to photograph a stranger’s fingernail, Andreoni proudly tells me he has “a friend in Italy with a three-inch flicking nail”.

I wander over to Greece vs Wales in the veterans’ tournament, still trying to establish what the optimum viewing position is as the players dance around the table for attacking angles. The Greeks are very much on top and go on to win by an aggregate score of 14-3, each goal met by a yelp towards a man who looks exactly like Saul Berenson from Homeland, to instruct him to go and update the scoreboard.

On the show tables, it’s England’s old boys vs Scotland. The eight players go about their meticulous pre-game ritual — out comes a decades-old cloth from a wooden box, before each figure’s base is polished to get them sliding perfectly on the surface — before a big guy with “McMALC 9’ on the back of his Scotland shirt growls to everybody and nobody: “This is more than Subbuteo.” England rack up an aggregate score of 13-2 on their way to the knockout stages.

The polishing is painstaking but crucial. From the under-12s to the veterans’ games, the figures glide around the pitches like tiny Rolls-Royces (rather than toppling about like the weightless, old-school Subbuteo figures of the past). At half-time, they all get polished again. Some of the fine motor skills are astonishing: I watch a giant Frenchman flick a figure from deep inside his own half to reach the ball on the opposition byline, easily a metre away, to molecular levels of precision. These friction-harnessing moments, like curling at the Winter Olympics, are like ASMR to witness.

A fairly typical ultra-defensive Subbuteo setup (Adam Hurrey/The Athletic)

The sheer scale of the tournament means there are thrashings. Best, the flat-cap-wearing player-commentator, is tonked 11-0 by Italy’s Cesare Santanicchia, a seasoned campaigner who reached Friday’s final of the ‘old-style’ Subbuteo competition. Best’s spirits are not even slightly dampened by this.

Otherwise, the scorelines are relatively tight: more goals than the average day of league football, but well short of ‘Boxing Day 1963’ chaos. This is largely down to the breadth of talent but also tactics. Most passages of attacking play, to the untrained glance, seem futile; the defending player is allowed a covering, positional flick for every possession flick of their opponent. This often leads to a surprisingly high-tempo game of cat and mouse, the attacking team being shepherded into cul-de-sacs before giving the ball away (as soon as the ball hits an opposing figure, possession changes hands.) Blanket, eight-man back lines are the standard defensive approach and are hard to breach… until, suddenly, they are.

It’s then a one-on-one scenario inside the shooting zone (essentially the final third of the pitch, you can’t shoot from outside that), at which point the attacking player takes a breath and lines up their shot, while the defending player extends their rodded goalkeeper to the edge of their ‘six-yard box’ (but no further), primed to repel what is a reasonably-high-xG opportunity. The velocity of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shooting is impressive, given that the rules forbid a player from using their thumb as a flicking “spring” — all flicks must be an unaided extension of the index finger.

(Some purists bemoan the modern design of the goalkeepers, no longer the realistic depiction of a classic football custodian in “tipping the ball over the bar” pose, with one Twitch viewer dismissing the larger, blockier shot-stoppers as “Spongebob Squarepants s***”.)

In a game of tense strategy, unashamedly packed defences and occasional outbursts of theatrics, it turns out Italy are very good at Subbuteo.

They win seven of the 12 titles across the individual and team World Cups. Of the 24 finalists, 11 are Italian. National anthem Il Canto degli Italiani is gleefully bellowed out several times in a row during the trophy presentations at Sunday lunchtime, but their glorious weekend is not without high drama. Their defending men’s team world champions defeat England in the last eight, surviving an almighty scare when Kaspar Bennett, leading 1-0 against Luca Battista, has a goal disallowed by the Maltese referee, who decides the ball wasn’t over the line.

Appropriately enough for a pursuit that some thought had enjoyed its heyday back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the main reason Italy are such a dominant force in Subbuteo is because their domestic scene is, frankly, out of this world. Honestly, we’re talking Gazzetta Football Italia-era levels of concentrated star power.

Twenty of the top 50 players in the FISTF world rankings ply their not-quite-literal trade in Italy’s Serie A. Spain’s Carlos Flores, the world No 1 notably absent in Tunbridge Wells (the programme says he’s injured, the talk in The Pit is that he’s recently changed jobs) plays for the Fratelli Bari club in Reggio Emilia, the new world champion Dimopoulos for the Rome-based Serie A title holders Blue Flame. England’s world No 18 Elliott Bellefontaine — the David Platt of Subbuteo, if you will — was unveiled this summer by Serie B outfit ASD Messina. OK, Subbuteo is brilliant.

However, amid the stern-faced team spirit, the wholesome broadcasting and the slightly underwhelmed crowd, I’m yet to encounter a true character. But then, as the United States and Australia prepare for a group-stage dead rubber — two historical sporting titans, yet relative minnows in this world and by now eliminated from the tournament — I receive a tap on the shoulder.

“You should talk to that guy…”

“That guy” has a great tan, hair tied in a man bun, eyes you want to swim in. There’s a touch of the Juan Matas about him, maybe. He cruises to a 4-0 win over Australia’s Green with a slightly annoyed look on his face. It’s the same expression that Dieudonne, the queen of Subbuteo, has worn this weekend: I’m better than this.

Maybe he is. He is also, we should confidently speculate, the only person who will ever secure the double of Subbuteo world title and Emmy nomination. In the same year.

His name is Christian Filippella. Two days earlier, he’d flown in from Los Angeles to win the ‘old rules’ Subbuteo World Cup, held on the first-floor concourse of Tunbridge Wells’ Royal Victoria Place shopping centre, a mere flick away from a branch of Claire’s Accessories.

Scrolling down Filippella’s Instagram feed, there are pictures of him riding motorcycles down Italian coastlines, sailing his boat in the Pacific, flying a plane over Los Angeles and posing on the red carpet of seemingly endless Hollywood premieres.

“My friends sometimes call me ‘the real Forrest Gump’… I like to try, like, everything. I’m very adventurous. So, I guess it’s my sign, Sagittarius, you know?”

I catch up with him a few days after the World Cup. Filippella is back in Italy (he has lived in Los Angeles for almost a decade and is now a dual citizen), having signed up with Salernitana for the start of the Serie A season this month. Work commitments — he is a film and TV producer — mean he may not be able to be there for Salernitana’s Champions League campaign (sorry, yes, I should have said: there’s a Champions League. And a Europa League. Subbuteo is amazing.)

Even Filippella’s Subbuteo back story sounds like the early draft of a coming-of-age film script.

“I played it since I was like, six, yeah. And the way I started playing… it’s kind of like a fairytale.

“It was Christmas. I was born on December 20 and, back then, my family would never buy me a (birthday) present because it was so close to Christmas. That year, it was, like, crazy snowing and we were stuck, literally stuck, in our house in the countryside. At one point, we’re gathering around the fireplace and somebody knocks on our door and we’re like, ‘Who’s that?’

“And it was a guy holding a box, he was trying to sell it. ‘It’s just a game, it’s like miniature soccer.’ And my father, he felt sorry for him, he gave him some money. And it was Subbuteo! So we opened it, we put it on the floor, me and my brother, and, since then, it became a passion. We would do leagues with all our neighbours and little tournaments… we had no idea there was actually a federation.

A mere selection from Filippella’s Subbuteo trophy collection (Christian Filippella)

“Eventually, we read in Guerin Sportivo, the magazine that comes with the Gazzetta dello Sport (newspaper), that there was a tournament: ‘Send your info here if you want to play.’ And we were, like, ‘Oh my gosh, really?’ So we went to this tournament and we found out there were all these players, playing on a competitive level. There were clubs. So we created our club: Benevento.

“And since then, it’s been legendary how many tournaments I won, everywhere I went. I have hundreds of trophies. They would have these incredible trophies, they were really big. I won everywhere I went, pretty much, back in the ’90s.”

And then, suddenly, he stopped. First he studied law, then film, then he moved to Spain, then Ireland, then California. “I don’t think I ever announced my retirement.”

Out in the Subbuteo wilderness, like Sylvester Stallone’s eponymous, checked-out retiree in the sixth Rocky film, Filippella didn’t flick a figure in anger for 15 years. Efforts were made to track him down and tempt him back, first by his old Italian foe Massimo Bolognino, a three-time world champion. “I used to beat Massimo. I remember I won against him once in the final of the Italian Masters, 6-0. It was always me and him getting into the finals.”

By the mid-2010s, the U.S. Subbuteo scene was gathering momentum. National champion Zach Walker tried to enlist the exile for the American team at the 2015 World Cup, only for his message to end up in Filippella’s spam folder. “I saw it a year later. I was, like, ‘Well, thank you so much, but I don’t play anymore’.”

He was Subbuteo’s Mr Miyagi, his retirement resolve being tested by Walker’s Daniel-san. “He was living near me in Orange County. I was convinced to go and play a couple of games. I went — and I won both games. I was like, ‘OK, maybe I can still play…’”

In his forties, Filippella was finally a World Cup Subbuteo player. A promising knockout-stage performance in Belgium in 2016 was followed by a run to the individual semi-finals in Gibraltar in 2018, losing to this year’s finalist Leroy. Filippella was catching up, even if the post-millennium reach of Subbuteo took some getting used to.

“I was talking with the guys from Singapore. I’m like, ‘When did you guys get so good?’”

Sensing this resurgent, unthawed passion for the game he’d been introduced to on that snow-bound Christmas Day 43 years ago, I suggest a logical collision of his two worlds. Why not make a Subbuteo film?

“I made a short film when I stopped playing, my first film at the national film school in Italy. It’s a great homage to the game. It’s called Silver Nail and back then it was considered, like, a masterpiece. I’m not kidding. Unique.”

Respite from the commodified pre-storm calmness of the xx comes in the form of the commodified mid-storm storming of Gala’s “Freed From Desire”, although this isn’t quite the crowd to join in with the na-nana-nana-naa-na-na-naa-na-naa-na-ing.

GO DEEPER

“Football fans brought ‘Freed from Desire’ back – that’s some sort of justice for me”

Don’t doubt the emotional capacity of even the most grizzled Subbuteomen, though. The England veterans’ semi-final against Belgium, locked at 1-1 after three of the four games, comes down to sudden-death extra time. Up steps the English Subbuteo Association’s vice-chairman Bob Varney. The angle is tight. His goalkeeper-wielding Belgian opponent is the 28th-best veteran Subbuteo player on the planet. Varney flicks the ball goalwards, up over a Belgian figure on the way, it bobbles inside the far post and there are — without exaggeration — the first true “limbs” of the weekend.

What a moment we’re going the vets World Cup final #Subbuteo #FISTFWC24 pic.twitter.com/ZvDG5nevzw

— English Subbuteo Association (@EnglishSubbuteo) September 22, 2024

But the Italians have the final word. Their veterans take care of Varney’s mob in the final and, in the climax to this whole, marvellous 48 hours of quasi-catenaccio, their men’s team break through to score a last-gasp goal to bring their tie level against Belgium… and win the World Cup final on goals scored.

A Belgian sits on a plastic garden chair, inconsolable even by the news that his compatriot Dieudonne has secured her 12th women’s team World Cup.

The Subbuteo roadshow does not stop. Within a month, the best players in Europe will come together in Athens for the Champions League. England’s representatives are Langton Green SC, newly renamed after the birthplace of the game’s inventor Adolph. And since no international sporting event is complete without the word “legacy”, they have partnered with local Tunbridge Wells schools to develop the game for the next generation.

Filippella’s post-tournament homecoming tour has reached the Amalfi Coast. His latest film project is a documentary about an off-grid jungle community in Hawaii. But Subbuteo still has a hold of him and he wants to take it to a new level.

“They do world tournaments of…what do you call them… the arrows…”

Darts?

“Darts! Nothing against darts, which has a lot of technique and everything, but Subbuteo is such a difficult game, I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be a sport. It’s mental, physical, technical…

“I’ve been thinking about organising a private World Masters in Las Vegas. I would invite the best players in the world, to play a Masters outside of FISTF. I think it would be amazing if it was televised, so many people would watch it. It’s such an incredible game played at the highest level.”

A breakaway bid for world domination and the eyeballs of the armchair fans? Subbuteo would truly have made it then.

Roll on Paris 2026.

(Top photo: Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)