Almanac Numbers: The magic of fifteen thousand

 

The magic of fifteen thousand

 

I don’t really understand why fifteen thousand is such a magic number in my research and publishing life. My first book sold 15,000 copies between 1975 and 2023. The most popular article I ever wrote was downloaded 15,000 times from the Deakin University and other websites. It has now been removed from the Deakin one. I don’t know why.

 

A long article on Tom Wills and other matters is an item on the old Australian Football website and had been visited 15,000 times on the last occasion I looked. It is probably completely coincidental, but it is weird at the same time, is it not? It also appeared on my favourite outlet, The Footy Almanac, thanks to John Harms and his team, under the title Tom Wills country or how the legend has taken over. It is accessible Here. 

 

The subjects of my publications over the years have varied. The first book was an account and an explanation of the Liberal social welfare reforms in the United Kingdom between 1906 and 1914 just before the first World War. It was commissioned by the Economic History Society as part of a series that attempted to explain economic and social phenomena to senior school and university students in the United Kingdom and perhaps more widely. It had a tortuous birth, the first version being roundly criticised by an extreme conservative academic. Thanks to my first editor, Professor Michael Flinn of Edinburgh University, I was given the opportunity and assistance to rewrite it, and it became one of the Society’s best-selling offerings. Since then, my wife, Frances, has taken over the editing role as Col Ritchie noted recently.

 

The article had a come-on title, partly borrowed from a devotee of the code responding to the game’s critics in Australia. ‘“Our wicked foreign game”: Why has Association Football (soccer) not become the main code of football in Australia?’ It appeared in the international journal Soccer and Society in 2007 in hard copy but was only viewed 1493 times there! The journal maintains a pay wall, so the Deakin site was much more accessible.

 

Roy Hay, ‘“Our Wicked Foreign Game”, revisited’, was a revised and updated version of the article published in 2006. It was revised again and given as a paper to the Inaugural International Football History Conference in Manchester on 16 June 2017. It later formed the basis of the Australian chapter on association football in the Palgrave International Handbook of Football and Politics. I have squeezed quite a lot out of the original idea.

 

Roy Hay

11 December 2025

 

Read more articles from Roy Hay HERE.

 

 

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