A Bangor-based football fan has opened up a goldmine of information for fans of Belfast Celtic, Cliftonville, Crusaders and Donegal Celtic which includes every result from the clubs’ senior history and from right across the Irish League.
Haydn Milligan’s free-to-access Irish League Archive (ILA) which is the most comprehensive website the local game has ever seen has taken him three years to collate.
And he’s amassed an eye-watering 35,000 results with 121,000 goals in games between 500 teams at 400 venues in no fewer than 41 competitions dating back to 1881 when football was played by clubs from the south as well as from the north of Ireland.
You will be able to find out: For Belfast Celtic, the two occasions on which they scored 10 goals away from home. The final League tables from their 14 title-winning seasons.
The path to their eight Irish Cup successes. Head-to-head results against their bitter rivals Linfield. For Donegal Celtic, all the details from their five seasons in the Irish League. The route to their Irish Cup semi-final of 2008. The number of goals they scored against Crusaders at Seaview in 2010.
There are also details of who Cliftonville played in their first Irish League match in 1890. Which team they shared their League title with in 1905/1906. Which team they hammered 8-0 away in 2012. Which of their players was the first to win the Footballer of the Year award. Their first away win in Europe in 2007.
The three clubs conceding 10 goals to the Crues in the 1960s. Final League tables from their seven title-winning seasons. Their route to six Irish Cup wins. Their many winners of the Footballer and Player of the Year awards. Where they got to for their first foray into Europe. All the head-to-head results between Cliftonville and Crusaders. And much more besides.
Haydn, a 72-year-old Linfield fan and retired Information Technology expert who had extensive experience in forensic data work, is delighted with the early response to his labour of love.
“It all started after I tried to locate some old results from Irish League encounters from years back and I wondered why, when it was easy to get the scores from the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool games, it was so hard to track down similar information about matches here,” says Haydn who spent months and months beavering away on his truly herculean task to research the results before gathering them together on a website.
“That got me thinking about trying to round up all the scores from the past.
"The fact that the idea for his ILA had been born during the Covid-19 pandemic meant that the work proved to be a welcome pastime at home for Haydn during lockdown though the scale of the job surprised even the author.
“I was lucky that I was able to access newspaper archives online because libraries were shut during the pandemic. A couple of books were good starting points too but they didn’t have all the results which was what I wanted to include in my project along with the dates of the games and the stages of the various competitions.
“I thought I might have been able to source some results from club websites but Ballymena United’s was the only one that was really useful.”
Haydn also discovered that a number of the already-published Irish League tables were incorrect because the goals for and goals against statistics didn’t tally which forced Haydn to go back and check the results and ‘fix’ the final league standings.
As the end of the project came in sight for Haydn, he realised that even after visits to re-opened libraries the task of finding some of the results was still a challenge.
“A number of them were pretty elusive,” he admits.
“But my endurance – and the patience shown by my wife Norma during my hours and hours spent in my office on the computer – paid off and I kept chipping away until I eventually had all the results in the bag. It was a great feeling.
“I was on a roll and I did think about trying to winkle out all the scorers on the website but that was impossible with 121,000 goals. The notion of attempting to find all the half-time scores was quickly abandoned too,” says Haydn, a former pupil of Regent House School in Newtownards, who returned to live in Northern Ireland several years ago after four decades working in England where he supported Portsmouth.
“But my first love like that of my father and grandfather before me has always been Linfield and I followed their results every week and saw them each time I was back in Northern Ireland on visits. And now I rarely miss any of their matches home or away,” says Haydn who toyed with the idea of publishing a book containing his ILA findings.
“But I reckoned it would have needed four reasonably-sized volumes to get all the information in. So, I stuck with my original plan to incorporate all the facts and figures I have in a website which is available for all fans of the game here”
“And it’s free because I never even contemplated making it pay-for-view because it was a hobby for me, and only cost me a comparatively small amount of money though I wouldn’t say no to sponsorship or perhaps PayPal assistance down the line to meet the running costs.”
Haydn has already discovered that it’s not just what people refer to as ‘football anoraks’ who have signed up to his archive.
“The website is quite simple to use and I think it has definitely settled a few arguments about games from yesteryear,” he continued.
“Once supporters dip a toe in the archive, I think they will keep coming back to it. It’s fairly addictive.
“Standards are rising all the time and crowds are going up. And I think the emergence of full-time professionalism has been a real boost.”
Haydn’s work on his archive hasn’t stopped and he has been adding links to results to newspaper reports of games and video clips of highlights from YouTube which have become more and more popular in the last 20 years.
“I’ll also be updating the results at the end of every season.
“And I’m sure there will be a lot of interest in the fact that Belfast Celtic’s results until they went out of the game are in the archive too.”
One thing that totally surprised Haydn as he did his research was his discovery that teams here have competed in 41 competitions including European tournaments.
He says: “I would have guessed perhaps 15 because I remember watching tournaments like the Blaxnit Cup. But there were a lot of even more obscure cups played for in Ireland too and of course Irish clubs did once compete in the FA Cup. And how many supporters have ever heard of the Mercer Cup? – the information is in the archive.
Incidentally Haydn admits some stats on his website may be wrong.
He says: “Some of my sources might not have been accurate but if anyone spots any mistakes, I’m hoping they will get in touch via the website with proof of the right information.
"Since launching the website last year quite a few people have contacted me. All have been very generous with their compliments. One particular person has been very helpful in clearing up some inaccuracies in matches at the end of the 19th century. I have even had contact from people in Poland, Spain and England as well as several local ‘football historians.”
For more information about the website go to www.irishleaguearchive.org
