If you're thinking of throwing out a collection of football programmes - don't. They can fetch impressive prices at auction.

Mr Ian Whyte, director of Whyte's in Marlborough Street, Dublin, says programmes from international matches in the 1930s are "the cream".

Whyte's sold a 1934 programme of the Irish Free State versus Belgium - the first Irish World Cup game - which fetched £400. A 1936 programme of the Irish Free State versus Germany "which had the Nazi symbol and everything on it" was sold by Whyte's for about £300.

Mr Whyte says football programmes from the 1940s and 1950s tend to fetch between £10 and £20 each in Ireland. Programmes from the 1960s up to the Charlton era make between £5 and £15.

Condition is very important. Programmes must be complete, in good condition and preferably not folded. "With the really rare ones it doesn't matter too much. But if you're talking modern programmes they almost have to be mint to be of any interest.

"Personally, I like to see programmes with the changes written in - and the scores and who scored. Some collectors don't like that. But to me, and a lot of collectors, they know the programme has been to the match. It gives it character," says Mr Whyte.

"If you had the programme for the Bloody Sunday Gaelic football match in 1920 in Croke Park - that would be £1,000 plus. Tickets from that game are worth anywhere from £500 to £1,000," he says.

Mr Mike Ashton, sporting consultant at Phillips auction house in Glasgow, says football programmes can be "extremely valuable and are very collectible. But to have individual value of any note they need to be essentially pre-war." He says that while programmes from 1955 to 1998 tend to be worth very little, there are exceptions.

For instance, "prior to the Munich air crash in 1958, the last match that Manchester United played was against a team called Red Star from Belgrade. Now if you've got the Red Star Belgrade-Manchester United programme from February 1958, you've got something worth about £1,500".

The value of pre-war programmes depends on the club involved. For example, the pre-war programmes of clubs like Chelsea and Arsenal "are still quite inexpensive and can sell at auction for perhaps £10 to £15 each. They had huge attendances pre-war so they printed more programmes."

But there are clubs which carry a premium. For example, Manchester United programmes from the 1930s would sell for about £150 sterling each. Programmes from the early post-war years should fetch £25 "and so on until the present day when they're only worth coppers", he says.

"It's sometimes the smaller clubs pre-war which can carry high value. And then if you get some of the early Cup Final programmes from about 1912 or 1913 they can go for several thousand pounds each."

Mr Ashton will be selling two football programmes from a club called Leeds City in a Phillips sporting memorabilia auction on October 7th. "They were a football league club in existence for only a short space of time. They eventually went bust in the early 1900s. I've got two programmes from I think 1909 and I've got them catalogued for £500 to £1,000 each," he says.

He has also sold a lot of five or six early Crystal Palace programmes from about 1920 for more than £1,000 sterling.

Football programmes for the war years tend to fetch £20 to £40 each, depending on the club and the match involved, he says.

The European Cup Final of 1967, Inter Milan against Glasgow Celtic, is worth between £30 and £40 at auction, "but there are not many of the European games post-war that are much more valuable than that. The 1968 final is easily attainable and is only worth a few pounds", he says.