Welcome to BantamsHeritage.com.
We are a groundbreaking project for professional football in the United Kingdom, strictly dedicated to Bradford City FC. Many other clubs, and indeed countries, in other professional sports track and record their history via the hugely-popular heritage number system. Every player who has represented that team throughout history is given a number in chronological order of their debut appearance.
No English professional football side has adopted that system. Until now.
We have collated, compiled and tirelessly checked every single game of professional football Bradford City have played since their formation in 1903, through to the present day. Up until the end of the 2017/18 season, we have recorded 1,247 players who have worn the famous claret and amber shirt. Bantams Heritage has, therefore, helped to establish a unique identity for Bradford City – and given every player their rightful place in the club’s history. In time, we hope to liaise with the club to have each player who wears the shirt have their heritage number represented on the kit and unveil a number of heritage-based projects to solidify Bradford City’s place at the heart of the city’s culture for over a century.
Naturally, with such an exhaustive project, we have had to be clear and concise about who does, and does not, receive a heritage number. Therefore, the following five competitions are what we have regarded as competitive, first-team football:
- League football (Premier League and Football League)
- FA Cup
- Football League Cup
- Football League Trophy
- European competition (in Bradford’s case, the 2000 Intertoto Cup)
One difficult, and noteworthy, exemption from our records are war-time football. A glance at the records for war-time football revealed an extraordinary amount of ‘guest’ appearances – players who were either serving in the area or simply filled the numbers during the war-time leagues of the Second World War. Given the exceptional circumstances of the wider world, we opted against including those.
But our goal and aim is not strictly limited to the heritage number project, even if that is our defining piece of work. We are aiming to become the absolute definitive place for statistics and records relating to Bradford City. Whether it be the standard list of the club’s all-time goal-scorers or appearance-makers, or more left-field articles such as players to have scored on their debut, or managerial records – we are aiming to cover it all.
Via our Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts we aim to provide plenty of content for Bradford fans to enjoy and share. What, however, is not in our mandate is to have ANY sort of public opinion on matters such as the club’s ownership. We are completely independent and are dedicated to celebrating the wonderful history of a wonderful club.
It has taken well over a year to compile and collate this data. We hope you appreciate the results of the project, and we endeavour to hopefully back-date and award certificates to as many players on the list (as well as descendants of those players no longer with us) over time.
So, after reading that, we think you’ll want to see the list in full, right? If the answer to that question is yes – simply click here.
