1951 FIFA Youth International Tournament Official and Extremely Rare Programme includes England and Northern Ireland

Before we go into the exceptional rarity of this item firstly let us explain the history of the competition.  The tournament started in 1948 in London (the programme for this tournament is easy to find) so this was the 4th edition of an annual tournament which has now evolved into the Under 20 World Cup.

Originally, FIFA ran a tournament format that was small and highly localised to the European continent.  This season was hosted by France and ran from March 22nd until March 26 with just 8 invited nations participating.  The nations were: Austria Belgium, England, France, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia won its first title defeating Austria 3-2 in the final in Cannes with future legendary striker Milos Miluntiovic named best player and top goalscorer. In 1955 UEFA took over the running of the competition as it was predominantly European and the tournament shifted away from invitational to a merit based system.  It became the UEFA European Under-18 Championship in 1981 and later the UEFA Under 19 Championship in 2002.

FIFA came back into the arena in 1977 when it created the U-20 World Cup which played under the name of the FIFA World Youth Championship before changing its name in 2005 to the FIFA U-20 World Cup.  U-17's and Women's World Cup followed on later.

Now onto this rare item - until now no one thought that this programme existed, the French have always been very hit and miss on the programme front, with some clubs issuing and others not doing so.  This though is a full programme and was probably issued to VIP's only.  We asked AI about the existence  of the programme and this was the response:

"No sports auction house, private collector, or football association archive has ever published an image of an official cover, because a centralised, multi-page tournament booklet was likely never produced by the French hosts in the first place."

We have scanned a few of the pages but not all as we do not want reprints surfacing pretending to be the real deal at a later date.

Gordon Jago who became a pioneering manager managing Rangers, Millwall, Queens Park Rangers and Tampa Bay Rowdies and was inducted into the US Soccer Hall of Fame, Chelsea's Frank Blunstone and Vic Groves who became Arsenal's Club Captain all played in the tournament.

As the World's number 1 football dealer we love being able to source items and right the history books - the programme does exist, this is the only example that has ever surfaced and it is in excellent condition.  We also have a VIP ticket elsewhere in the store that came from the same tournament.  We believe that this is a museum piece.