Arsenal Photos From 1930s-1950s Colorized In Amazing Detail [PHOTOS]

As a soccer fan and history buff, I love being able to see relics and old pictures of the beautiful game from generations past. Learning about the history of the sport, and also the specific team in which one roots for, is an extremely important thing in my mind. Putting a considerable amount of time and energy into a club without knowing much about their past successes and failures seems a bit senseless.

While reading about a certain club’s history is unquestionably essential to being a complete fan, pictures can usually tell just as much, if not more, about a place in time than words on a page. Visually, images can bring thoughts and memories to life once again (or perhaps for the first time).

29-year-old Arsenal fan and English teacher Alex le Duc (@GoonerFrog) took his love for his club a step further when he realized that turning old black and white Arsenal-themed photographs into colored images would capture a completely different sense of the period in time.

Le Duc recently explained why he chose to work on the old Arsenal pictures. The Frenchman said, “I thought my knowledge of the club’s history was not good enough. The Arsenal have a history they can be proud of. I could have gone through lines and lines of history blogs (that I enjoy) but I decided to start having a look at pictures pre 1970s.”

“Obviously there were in black and white. I stumbled upon a 1936 picture of fans going to an away game with a good old school locomotive. I saw the smiles on their faces – it seemed like happy times – yet the black and white made it all look all grim (at least to my mind.) I thought it’d be fun to give it some colors and make it look like it really was.”

While he obviously did an outstanding job in colorizing the images, le Duc claims that he is no artist. He stated, “I have no art background whatsoever; I just like to fiddle with Photoshop really. I have come to handle it pretty well in all modesty – click here, click there, hours of trying, some online tutorials and here I am talking to you. I am no artist as I don’t create things, I just work on them.”

“I try to leave as few details as possible to my imagination. Some Arsenal fans are fonts of knowledge; they would not let me make a mistake on a kit color! The biggest challenge is all that research on the kits, the fashion styles, and the players’ eye color and hair color.”

Le Duc also explained that he was aided by a few other Arsenal fans along the way to get the coloring and historical accuracy spot on. “History is history and it must be told as such. I have teamed up with historians of the club, and a Gooner that was born in the 1940s who started going to games when he was four. They are valuable help and I am very thankful for that.”

Regardless of which team you may support, viewing the stunningly colorized images by le Duc is certainly something every soccer fan can appreciate.