Stepping inside Yard Ball in Sheffield is like being transported back 40 years to a time when kids played football on the streets, mums yelled that tea was ready and you knew you had to be home when the street lights came on. Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger was playing on the radio, shell suits and dayglo-coloured socks were all the rage and every Sunday at 4pm teenagers would rush in to tape the top 40 singles chart because it was before social media or mobile phones were invented. For kids like Scott Riley (now 44) the eighties and nineties were a more simple time when he would lose hours playing out with his mates, kicking a football all the while dreaming he was playing for England at the World Cup or Euros just like Gazza or Lineker.
Now, 40 years later the children, parents and grandparents of today have the chance to go back in time and experience what it’s like being a kid in the 80s and 90s all thanks to Scott and his business partner Oliver Booth, 37. “I thought of this concept during lockdown,” Scott tells me. “At the time my kids were nine and six and playing football in the garden was getting a bit dull.
My wife was pregnant with our youngest child and I was trying to entertain my son Ronnie and daughter Bella. “I took the kids to my mum who still lives in a maisonette on the Sheffield estate where I grew up and they couldn’t get their heads around the fact that on council estates kids just play out. I remember there were two boys kicking a can of.