Football Media

As anyone with moderate traffic to their website knows, spammers and pissed off commenters are the scourge of the Internet. The anonymity the Internet provides – especially the lack of personal, eye to eye contact – allows people to say and do things they wouldn’t think of doing and saying in person.

Combine this with the emotions football evokes in people and it’s safe to say that football fans have a great potential to be assholes.

I’m not here to bash fans – we are who we are and I know first hand how strong those waves of anger and joy can be. The rush you get from baiting opposition fans, the thrill of beating down on them when your team wins, it’s war without bullets and it feels so good when you’re winning that one forgets all civil norms.

But is there a way to build an online community that doesn’t engage in such behavior without compromising on the passion that makes football go around?

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 0

On the surface, a “super fan” is just like any other serious fan – wears the team colours, knows the history and follows the team with a passion bordering on religious devotion.

Underneath the surface though, the super fan is a channel through whom other fans can experience and bring to life their own love for the team.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging Comments: 0

So…you want to be a football journalist? You want press access to all the matches and press conferences, one-on-one interviews with the football stars, dining with the biggest names in the game?

There’s good news, and there’s bad news.

The bad news is that your chances of ‘making it’ as an averagely-successful journo working for a top-of-the-line newspaper are less than 1 in 10,000. And your chances of being a really, really, REALLY successful journalist and ‘living the life’ (which usually involves writing a book, being called up by players for exclusive interviews and god knows what) are 1 in a 1,000,000. 1 in a million, and I’m being generous.

The good news is that most people quit at the first hurdle – the challenge of getting in. The real battle for the top starts once you’re in the business – as long as you’re on the outside, you’re nothing (or very little). And since most people quit before they’re in, your chances of success can be a lot higher (still very poor odds but better than 1 in a million, at least) as long as you can figure a path into the world of football journalism.

So how do you do it? I asked the same question to a few journalists – some successful, some getting there, but all of them with different backgrounds, experiences and tips to share. From our conversations, here is a collection of tips that you can follow to dramatically increase your chances of getting in – of becoming a football journalist.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Journalism Comments: 4

Football bloggers are (usually) intimately familiar with Google – their first blog was probably on Blogger, their first ad network was probably AdSense and their first concern in getting traffic was to get links to their site so that they can get traffic from Google’s search engine. You probably use Analytics, iGoogle and Google Reader as well, while some of the more entrepreneurial bloggers have used Adwords at one time or the other.

So how else can Google help you? By sending you more traffic (and quality traffic at that) from Google News.

I’ve done a whole writeup on how you can get your blog / website listed in Google News – have a read and hopefully it will help you get more readers.

Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging, Promotion Comments: 1

I don’t want to obsess about MyFootballClub. I really don’t. So, for once and for all, I’ll just put my thoughts about the whole thing into words and hope that I can just link back to this post in the future as opposed to repeating this rant again.

The MyFC team are incredibly marketing-savvy – they took a passion common to all football fans – the desire to control your team’s fortunes – and made it into an affordable theme-park ride. As all theme-park rides, there are going to be some hiccups at the start and that’s acceptable and understood.

However, MyFC is also a business and as they become more established, they have a reputation to maintain and defend. Their marketing message is perfected and quite strong, so if they can do a passable job at delivering on the ‘promises’ their marketing makes, they should be raking in the moolah with enough to spare for a new car for each team member each year.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 15

Football fans are idiots. Passionate without a cause, loyal to a fault, fools in the face of truth and stupid enough to fall for the same tricks every time, every year.

To quote Sean Ingle (he wrote this 3 years ago):

After all, you remain hooked on a sport that has, over the past decade, become as competitive as a F1 warm-up lap – while at the same time taking ever-larger chunks out of your salary. Smart people would stand up to such exploitation. Football fans prefer to revel in their “hardcore” commitment.

Even if a match is shunted to some unholy hour to accommodate Sky, you think nothing of travelling hundreds of miles to sit in a stadium with all the atmosphere of a wake, to show loyalty to your club. The same club that’s always thinking of ingenious new ways to bleed you dry.

When it comes to football, your rationality goes awol. You worship players who are at best indifferent to you, and at worst despise you. If a referee makes a dubious decision against your team, he’s a wanker or a cheat. And if a journalist writes something you disagree with, he carries a vendetta.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 3

I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now – that Arseblog.com has joined OleOle.com.

Ok, so it’s not exactly headline news, what with the credit crunch, the gasoline prices, the fluctuating currency markets, the China earthquake and the fact that your girlfriend left you, but on a football blogging level (and trust me on this one), this is significant.

Not because Arseblog was one of the biggest (if not the biggest) independent football blog around. Not because the man sold out, or because he’s one of the lucky few who can now earn a full-time living writing (and doing other blogging-related stuff) about what he loves.

It’s significant because it’s the first step in organised blog aggregation. Welcome to the world of football blog networks.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging, Football Business Comments: 2

Earlier this month, an article in the NY Times called blogging for hire the ‘digital-era sweatshop’, and I couldn’t agree more (thanks for the link mate).

In fact, I think they’ve underestimated the problems linked with blogging for money (for starters, $10 / post is a lot better than what many people earn from blogging when English is their second language).

However, personal opinions aside, I want to tackle this in the context of football blogging and football business.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Blogging, Football Business Comments: 1

In late 2006, the Premier League went after YouTube in an attempt to remove the plethora of clips uploading by fans, and the knock-on effect had thousands of user accounts suspended for ‘repeat violations’ and the subsequent springing up of alternative sources of footy videos (no point in publicising them here).

Then in May 2007 the Premier League joined a class action lawsuit filed against YouTube. To quote the Reuters coverage:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 1

I remember, as a little kid, the anticipation and sheer joy involved in waiting for and finally acquiring a copy of the latest edition of the local cricket rag.

Times have changed – we deal almost exclusively with digital media now – but the tangibility of print media (books, magazines, newspapers) ensures that there’s a certain pleasure to be derived from consuming information in print, however fleeting and temporary that may be.

Recently Hugo wrote about football fanzines and the power they had (and their unfortunate decline). Today I’d like to introduce you to a soccer magazine with a different orientation: the New African Soccer magazine.

NAS are a UK-based publication offering an English-language magazine devoted to the African game.

To quote:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 0