The Saturday sports edition of the Sunderland Echo celebrates its centenary with a special edition this weekend.

And the search is now on for the country’s oldest sports extra.

Known as Pink, Green or simply football papers, they are becoming thinner on the ground as football kick-off times and production changes make them more difficult to produce.

Neil Watson is the sports editor of the Sunderland Echo, whose Pink newspaper this Saturday is up from 28 to 44 pages packed with history, facts figures – and all the latest weekend sports news.

He has written to all major regional papers in the country asking how old their Saturday sports papers are – in the interests of research – and originally in the hope of claiming the “oldest” title for the Echo’s Pink.

Sheffield Star’s Green ‘Un also marks its centenary this year, both papers being founded in 1907.

Neil said: “I wanted to do a survey to see if we have got the earliest.

“The Sheffield Star is running a banner saying it has the oldest sports paper in the world, but the Echo printed its first one the week before.

“Lots of papers in the 1800s printed a late edition with match reports and when people saw the pink paper they knew they were buying the right edition.

“The Football Echo of 1907 was our first standalone sports paper and prior to that, the Pink was known as the football scores edition.”

Of the oldest newspapers, the Newcastle Journal closed its Pink in 2005 after 110 years and Manchester has long since moved from a Saturday print slot due to Premiership matches rarely being played at 3pm on Saturdays any more.

Meanwhile, in the vaults of the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton there remain copies of their sports paper going back to 1898 – the Football Echo.

Editor Ian Murray said: “The first edition hit the streets on Saturday, September 3 of that year, which would seem to indicate we might now have the oldest weekend sports paper in the world.

“Like other newspapers in the UK, we re-branded to The Pink title in 1994, coming out with the new look on January 1.

“The last Football Echo was printed on December 18, 1993 and obviously there was no edition on Christmas Day of that year.”

So what’s the score? Do you know of a sporting extra that could lay claim to the title of the country’s – or the world’s – oldest?

Drop us a line by clicking here.