Football Media

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: 3

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

Yesterday we talked about the gap between what MyFC (My Football Club) initially promised and what the venture actually delivers in terms of value to the users. Today let’s talk about another company that arrived with a big bang but ultimately collapsed when the revenues did not materialise as expected (or rather, as their huge investments demanded).

FanBanta went bust some while back – the official word is that they’ve gone into administration, a euphemism for ‘we bet too much on the wrong horse’ and now one of the properties they owned (footballforums.net) has been bought out by Fast Web Media, the same company that owns 4thegame.com.

Recently over at Hive we talked about the need to operate in an emergency turnaround phase when running your business. To quote:

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

Fancy owning a football club? It used to be that you needed millions to buy out a club, but then MyFootballClub broke the barriers between big football and the common man and brought club ownership to the Internet for only £35 per year.

The biggest draw – the biggest selling point – was the level of control offered to members. Few people are interested in buying a share in a football club they don’t support – with all due respect, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Ebbsfleet United FC – but MFC worked around that by offering the illusion of control akin to Football Manager. Owners (us!) were to have a say in tactics, team selection, transfers, kits and what not.

The best part of all this – the best-executed part, that is – was the promotion. Give the fan a chance to select the team for a real game? Real-life football manager – and if you haven’t played the game, grab a copy and waste away a weekend so you can understand the drool-inducing addiction we are talking about.

Many have previously argued (including myself over at Soccerlens and Ian over at 200 percent – links here) that MyFC was unrealistic in what it promised and impractical in that fans, once they got over the initial excitement, would stop caring.

Apparently, that is exactly what is happening at MyFC.

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business Comments: 9

Previously we talked about how to get your football news site listed in NewsNow. That’s only half the battle though – once you’re in, you also need to know how to maximise exposure and traffic from NewsNow.

Here are a few suggestions to help you maximise traffic to your football news site from NewsNow:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Promotion Comments: 0

NewsNow (Football) is, at the time of writing, the easiest source of traffic for football bloggers. Yes, Google (search, images and news) may get you more traffic and social media sites like StumbleUpon can also bring in plenty of traffic, but NewsNow makes it easy. Once you’re in, you just need a catchy headline and the right timing and hundreds (and thousands) of readers will come flooding through NewsNow.

And while you’d think it’s quite simple to get into NewsNow (a straight-forward submission process, hardly any editorial criteria), most people stumble at this step. Here are a few pointers to help you get your blog in, without any hassles:

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Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Promotion Comments: 15