Numbers on shirts were treated as an insult

Clubs resisted numbering players for decades, and the objection tells you what sport thought it was selling.

Putting a number on a footballer's back sounds like the least controversial administrative act imaginable. It took the English game the better part of thirty years of argument, several rejected proposals and a lot of grumbling before it became compulsory in the late 1930s.

The objections were revealing. Numbering was said to spoil the look of the shirt. It was said to be unnecessary, because a supporter who followed a team properly should recognise the players. And underneath both, unstated but doing most of the work, was the sense that numbers belonged to prisoners, soldiers and livestock. To label a man was to say he was a unit.

What broke the resistance was not fairness or clarity. It was the press box and the radio. A commentator describing a match to people who could not see it needed a way to identify a man at a hundred metres, and newspapers wanted to print a diagram their readers could follow. Numbers made football legible to people who were not in the ground, and once football started earning money from those people the aesthetic objection evaporated.

Then the numbers did something nobody intended. Because they were assigned by position, one to eleven, right to left and back to front, they became the vocabulary of tactics. A number nine is a centre forward. A number six means one thing in England and something else in Argentina. Whole systems of play are described in digits by coaches who never think about where the convention came from. That is a notation system created by accident and it has outlived the formations it was designed to describe.

Squad numbering, introduced widely in the 1990s, quietly ended that. A player is now assigned a number for a season, so a twenty-two can play in central defence and a seven can be a left back, and the positional meaning survives only as a metaphor.

I think we lost something small and real there. The old system told you what a manager intended before kick-off, from the teamsheet, without a word of explanation.

The new one tells you what the marketing department could clear.