You may not want to hear it, but it’s the time of the year when stores are frantically getting ready for the holiday shopping season. The Christmas displays in shop windows seem to appear earlier and earlier each year.

Football is not immune to this, of course. The sport generates a tremendous amount of revenue for clubs and retailers worldwide from football shirts, equipment, books, DVDs and more.

But one big market that many foreigners may not realize or understand is the massive Football Annuals business in England.

Football Annuals are hardcover books that find their way under the Christmas tree of many British teens and grown adults. The annuals are heavy on quantity and light on quality. Usually there are a couple hundred pages filled with photographs and articles, and they’re the perfect books to flip through wherever and whenever you have time.

Growing up in the UK as a child, I remember getting Shoot Annual and Match Annual. They were the type of gifts that you knew what they were before you ripped open the Christmas wrapping paper because of their unique rectangle shape, thickness and weight.

While the Shoot Annual and Match Annual were filled with fluff interviews, sidebar features, team photos and somewhat interesting articles, there were other annuals available. In fact, the business of annuals was, and is, huge. There’s The Beano Annual, Dennis The Menace Annual, The Dandy Annual, Roy Of The Rovers Annual and more. Beano and Dandy are British institutions and have nothing to do with football, but are perfect comic books that sum up British humor.

The business of football annuals has changed very little. Many of the aforementioned titles are still available with new titles released each autumn. Football clubs even produce their own annuals now as well as News Of The World and BBC’s Match Of The Day.

If you like collecting football books or have children who are interested in the sport, a football annual could be a perfect gift this holiday season.

What are your memories of football annuals? Share your trips down memory lane by clicking the comments link below.

If you’re interested in spending a few carefree minutes playing an online football game, one that’s worth playing is Match’s Super League.

While the game looks pretty simple and slightly unappealing at first, it quickly becomes extremely addictive. You play against fictitious clubs in your mini-league as you try to become champions.

Some of the moves are easy to do and you’ll soon find some tried and true tactics to scoring goals. Other techniques are pretty difficult such as the volley and trying to save a penalty.

Those first few carefree minutes playing this game could end up being more than an hour if you’re not so careful. But it’s still fun nevertheless.

Over the next few days, expect to read a multitude of odes written by bloggers from the UK regarding the demise of Shoot Magazine, the popular British football publication which owner IPC announced it would be shutting it down at the end of this month.Shoot! was a hugely popular weekly football magazine aimed at children. Launched in 1969, the magazine featured plenty of pull-out posters and was a huge hit in the 1970′s and 1980′s.Without a doubt, it’s lasting contribution to football wasn’t the magazine itself but was the infamous league ladders that were shrinkwrapped inside the summer editions in preparation for each new season of English football. The league ladders were a masterful marketing idea by Shoot. You had to purchase all of the summer issues to ensure you’d receive the blank league ladders table as well as all of the team names that had to be perforated and inserted into the tables.The concept was that you would use the league ladders throughout the season and update it as each week’s matches concluded. For all of the years I collected the league ladders, I never once made it past October. Even for a little teenager like myself at the time, it was too tedious. But every summer, I still looked forward in anticipation of getting the new league ladders.In the late 1970′s after I was first introduced to Shoot Magazine, I always looked forward to the weekday morning when the latest issue would arrive at my local newsagent. I would scour every page, rip out the posters of my favorite teams and would tape them to my bedroom wall, much to the chagrin of my mother.However in the early 80s, I changed my allegiances from Shoot to a new magazine that was published in the UK named Match Weekly. Match featured detailed statistics in a pull-out section which was something completely new at the time. The publication took what Shoot did well but improved upon it. The irony is that Match is still around and doing well in the UK, while Shoot has now met its demise.Please share your memories of Shoot Magazine by clicking the comments link below.