‘There are so many crazy stories’: the hunt for every sports statue in world

“There are more statues of Lester Piggott in the UK than there are of sporting women,” said the statistician Chris Stride with dismay. “It is really bad … there are hardly any at all.”

In fact, there are a fewer than a handful of sporting women celebrated with public statues. They include the pentathlete Mary Peters on the outskirts of Belfast; the 1930s Wimbledon champion Dorothy Round in Dudley; and the trailblazing footballer Lily Parr at the National Football Museum in Manchester.

That is compared with more than 350 men, from Steve Ovett on Brighton seafront to John Curry at the ice skating arena in Sheffield, to a grimly determined arms-folded statue of Alex Ferguson outside Old Trafford in Manchester. Or a joyous, arms-aloft statue of Ferguson outside Pittodrie in Aberdeen.

We know this because of the almost obsessive determination of Stride, a senior lecturer of applied statistics at the University of Sheffield and the driving force behind From Pitch to Plinth: the Sporting Statues project.

For 14 years, Stride has been leading a team that records and researches statues of sportsmen and women around the world.

It is a project without end. In the coming weeks he will add about 20 UK statues and 120 US baseball statues. “There are about 120 football statues across the world we’ve got to add. We find them all the time. They are quite hard to search for on the internet … I can translate the word statue into lots of different languages for you.”

Stride began the project in 2010 for the simplest of reasons. “One of my colleagues came into my office and he said he had seen a lot of football statues as he went to games – ‘Do you know how many there are?’

“I’m a statistician. If someone asks how many are there of something, I need to know. I went out and counted how many there were, basically.”

He soon realised the interesting thing about the project was not the bald numbers, but the tales behind the statues and what they may tell us about society more widely.

“There are so many crazy stories behind them, there are so many interesting people who have come together to put them up,” Stride said.

Academically, almost nothing had been written about the subject, which Stride has corrected with zeal.

He said that since the 1990s statues had been recognised as an effective marketing tool for sports clubs, a phenomenon that began in the US and spread.

The reasons are mixed but “essentially, it has been shown that fans get more attached to a club if they feel nostalgic about it”.

They also help give new stadiums, which might look more like warehouses from the outside, some kind of identity which is why, outside Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, people will find statues of Tony Adams, Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Ken Friar and Herbert Chapman, who was Arsenal manager between 1925 and 1934, winning the league four times in five years.

Stride said it was interesting that sports statues do not tend to be in the centres of big cities but in smaller places that have often lost traditional industries.

“It is the idea of trying to put some identity back into that town. Public art has always been used to try to do that, it’s just that between the 1920s and 80s public art tended to be a bit more arty, more abstract. Surveys showed that the public aren’t really into abstract art.”

There was a swing back to figurative art but no appetite for the old figurative art subjects of military heroes or kings and queens, Stride said.

It’s a reason places such as Ashington (Jack Charlton) and Barrow (Emlyn Hughes, Willie Horne) have sporting statues. “They’re often towns that have lost their key industries and they are clinging to something which will give them some identity.”

Sporting statues are also fascinating for how many get it so wrong.

A recent statue of Harry Kane in Walthamstow was widely mocked, joining a roll-call of misfires including a weirdly featured Ronaldo bust at Madeira airport that was lampooned on Saturday Night Live and a 12ft Maradona in Kolkata, India, which was said to look more like Bobby Ewing from Dallas, the football manager Roy Hodgson, or “someone’s gran”.

Stride said there was a straightforward reason why so many are bad. “It is a really difficult thing to do.

“When I started the project I interviewed a lot of sculptors, maybe 20 or 30 of them, and one thing they collectively said is that sculpting a footballer is actually really difficult. It’s not like the Queen where you’ve only got the head right and then it’s a flowing dress.

“With footballers you’ve got the legs, the shape of the body – fans will recognise the shape. The really difficult thing is to get a sense of movement into it.”