Star Soccer was a weekly football

Football (soccer)

Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven players with a spherical ball...

 highlights program in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, which ran on Associated TeleVision

Associated TeleVision

Associated Television, often referred to as ATV, was a British television company, holder of various licences to broadcast on the ITV network from 24 September 1955 until 00:34 on 1 January 1982...

 (ATV) from 1965 until 1983 when it was replaced by a networked The Big Match

The Big Match

The Big Match is a British Association football television programme, which screened on ITV regularly between 1968 and 1992 ....

and Big Match Live.

History

The program’s early years were from London but from 1968 the show centred on Midlands teams. This coincided with the re-jigging of the ITV network. ATV was now a Midlands only broadcaster. The program was hosted initially by Billy Wright and then Gary Newbon

Gary Newbon

Gary Newbon is a television sports presenter and executive.He attended Culford School near Bury St Edmunds and upon leaving school he became a junior reporter in Cambridge and then a freelance Fleet Street journalist reporting on tennis and rugby...

, occasionally joined by a guest in the studio. The main commentator was Hugh Johns

Hugh Johns

Hugh Richard Lewis Johns was best known as a football commentator for ITV. During his career, he covered a thousand matches including four FIFA World Cup finals. - Early life and career :...

, ITV’s man at the microphone for the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final

1966 FIFA World Cup Final

The 1966 FIFA World Cup Final was the final match in the 1966 FIFA World Cup, the eighth football World Cup. The match was contested by England and West Germany on 30 July 1966 at Wembley Stadium in London, and had an attendance of 98,000. England won 4–2 after extra time to win the Jules Rimet...

. Other commentators included Peter Lorenzo, Nick Owen

Nick Owen

Nicholas "Nick" Corbishley Owen is an English television presenter and newsreader, best known for presenting the breakfast television programme TV-am and the BBC's local news show Midlands Today since 1997...

 and Peter Brackley

Peter Brackley

Peter Brackley is a football commentator, perhaps most famous for covering Football Italia on Channel 4 in the 1990s and formerly commentating for the computer game series Pro Evolution Soccer, and for Michael Owen's World League Soccer '99.-Radio:...

.

Format

The program’s format was typical of the time, extended highlights of a Midlands

English Midlands

The Midlands, or the English Midlands, is the traditional name for the area comprising central England that broadly corresponds to the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia. It borders Southern England, Northern England, East Anglia and Wales. Its largest city is Birmingham, and it was an important...

 based match was the main attraction and then shorter highlights of two other games from around the country, covered by other ITV regions. Where possible this would be a game involving a Midlands team at an “away” match. The program was broadcast during a “glory” period for Midlands based teams, Derby County

Derby County F.C.

Derby County Football Club is an English football based in Derby. the club play in the Football League Championship and is notable as being one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888 and is, therefore, one of only ten clubs to have competed in every season of the English...

, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa all won league championships, the latter two adding European Cups as well. Wolverhampton Wanderers also had a successful spell, bagged a brace of League Cups and competed in Europe; Stoke City also won this competition in 1972. An entertaining West Bromwich Albion side broke new boundaries by including three black players and a young Trevor Francis

Trevor Francis

Trevor John Francis , is a former footballer who won the European Cup with Nottingham Forest and played for England 52 times. He was England's first £1 million player...

 dazzled all before him for Birmingham City before his big money move to Forest. All this was captured by the ATV cameras, but it wasn’t just about the top division. Shrewsbury Town’s promoted side were featured in Division 2 specials, and on FA Cup

FA Cup

The Football Association Challenge Cup, commonly known as the FA Cup, is a knockout cup competition in English football and is the oldest association football competition in the world. The "FA Cup" is run by and named after The Football Association and usually refers to the English men's...

 weekends many lower league sides were featured. By 1983 the appetite for live football was growing and the FA allowed games to be shown in a deal with the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 and ITV

ITV

ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...

. Match of The Day Live and The Big Match Live would become the banners for TV football for the rest of the decade. Both networks continued to show highlights, however, they were invariably shunted to late night slots at a weekend.