When was the term ‘striker’ first used to describe a football forward?

“Growing up as a boy football supporter in the 1960s, I cannot remember coming across the term striker. Can anyone identify when or where this description of a goalscorer was first used?” asks Simon Warner.

It’s a good time for the question, with Erling Haaland and Darwin Núñez joining the Premier League this summer. Let’s start with the relevant part of the definition in the Collins online dictionary

An attacking player, esp one who generally positions himself or herself near the opponent’s goal in the hope of scoring

The position has been around since football began, but it seems – both anecdotally and through trawling the newspaper archives – that it didn’t really become commonplace until the 1970s.

“The term ‘striker’ was certainly in use by 1972,” writes David Warriston. “Jimmy Bone, a man of many clubs including spells at Norwich and Sheffield United, was then plying his trade at Partick Thistle whilst also working as a coalminer in his local pit. A news article at the time of the 1972 miners’ strike called him: ‘The striker on strike.’”

Sam Gee has another example from a similar period, involving a man who was the epitome of a striker. “In my dog-eared copy of Matt Busby’s memoir Soccer at the Top, published 1973, he writes of Denis Law, and his hesitation before signing him: ‘We did not seem in urgent need of a ‘striker’ (to use the with-it expression) ...’ The quotes around ‘striker’ are in the text. The use of ‘with-it’ also suggests it was a relatively new usage.”

Sam, Gus Cooper and Justin Hopkins all remembered a different type of Striker: the slightly naff alternative to Subbuteo. This tribute to Striker suggests the first set was produced in the early 1970s, though Justin Hopkins thinks he was playing it