From starters to five: a short history of football substitutions

Managers can make five subs in Premier League games. Long gone are the days when players battled on with broken bones

By Richard Foster for the Guardian Sport Network

More than 170 years have passed since the first football substitutes were used on the playing fields of Eton College. Back in the 1850s, when schoolboys did not turn up for games, replacements were drafted in at the last minute. The first recorded mention of substitutes came in 1863. “The Charterhouse eleven played a match in cloisters against some old Carthusians but in consequence of the non-appearance of some of those who were expected it was necessary to provide three substitutes,” reported Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, a weekly eight-page broadsheet.

It took the professional game almost a century to catch up, finally introducing substitutes in qualifying matches for the 1954 World Cup. The honour of being the first substitute in top class football was accorded to Richard Gottinger, who came on for West Germany in their 3-0 victory over Saarland in Stuttgart on 11 October 1953. West Germany qualified for that World Cup and went on to win it – the first of their world titles – but those 37 minutes were to be Gottinger’s only involvement. He never played for his country again.

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