The Offside?

[Guest]

Does anyone frequent any of these blogs? They seem to have a pretty wide range of team blogs, but a bit uneven as to quality/depth. Also--sponsored by a travel agent?

A bit bored this morning, and surfing for some interesting reading...

[ursus arctos]

The Offside?

I spend some time on the Italian ones, but your description is spot on (with "a bit" being an understatement). A number of them also suffer severely from "Rivals-like" nonsense (with a North American accent).

A striking number of the best football blogs I've read are written by members of OTF.

[My Name Is Ian]

The Offside?

I think that The Offside is generally considered to be the biggest football blog out there (at least solely for football).

[ursus arctos]

The Offside?

And The Sun has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Britain . . .

[My Name Is Ian]

The Offside?

Well, quite. It's something that I occasionally dip in and out of, but I find that sites with too much content on them can be a little bit off-putting (and I don't really do blogs about specific clubs unless I'm interested in the club).

[EIM]

The Offside?

This is why I only get 10 visitors a day.

Football blogs are laregely rubbish, though. Such is the media saturation with the game at the moment, it's impossible to find any original content or thinking. It just tends to be raehashed thoughts from Sky/BBC/The Sun/wherever.

[hobbes]

The Offside?

Yeah, I read that on the BBC I think.

[EIM]

The Offside?

Really? Oh. I c&pd it from a blog I read.

[My Name Is Ian]

The Offside?

There are decent blogs out there, but you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to them, and most people haven't got the time or inclination to do that.

[EIM]

The Offside?

I just tend to read the ones you link to. Let someone else do the wading for me.

[My Name Is Ian]

The Offside?

Yeah, I was kind of excluding myself from that, because I am very much the sort of person with the inclination to do it (even I haven't really got the time).

[ursus arctos]

The Offside?

200 is much too modest to say so, but his blog is much better than "decent".

And his list of links is an excellent selection of "crap free" football blogs, including all of the ones I currently read regularly (with the exception of PitacodeGringo's excellent guide to Brasilian football, which I imagine 200 hasn't gotten around to adding yet).

[tracteurgarcon]

The Offside?

200%, do you mind if I link your blog on mine?

My EURO2008 themed attempt at adding to blogosphere

[My Name Is Ian]

The Offside?

I'll sort out a link for yours this evening, Tratorello.

UA: You flatter me. I hadn't seen that one, no. I will give it the once over this evening and see if it passes my (completely arbitrary) fit & proper test. A quick glimpse would appear to confirm that it does, and that it has your recommendation is enough to swing the vote on its own.

EIM: Don't get too down-hearted about the lack of readers. It takes a while to build up anything like a readership online, so you just kind of have to keep plugging away at it. I would suggest adding a link list, because at least some of the blogs that you link to will link straight back, and people will then click through to yours. Just after the end of the season also sees something of a tailing off in the number of people reading about football, too. It's a good time of year to start one because, presuming (hope against hope) that you don't get bored with it in about 3 weeks time, you'll have a decent set of incoming links and something approaching a regular readership by the time the pre-season starts.

[Sam]

The Offside?

I don't mind the chaps from The Offside too much, largely because they link to me fairly frequently in their 'Daily Dose' internet-headline-roundups, and have written me very kind emails once or twice. I barely ever read their site though, I must admit.

EIM, what 200 said is about right. If you've only just started your blog up, you'll find things snowball somewhat after a while. It helps to try and get yourself on an internet search database as well (although granted that's a lot easier for sites like mine, being as how there are approximately two dedicated English-language, Argentine football sites on the whole of the net).

[Guest]

The Offside?

ursus arctos wrote:

200 is much too modest to say so, but his blog is much better than "decent".

Just added it to my Google Reader--looks excellent; thanks for the recommendation, I look forward to digging in.

[goldstone97]

The Offside?

I used to write the Chicago Fire blog on The Offside, until I left to focus on my own blog. The Offside is one of the few blogs that is actually profitable for its owners (a travel agency), and it plays a valuable role for North American soccer coverage, giving an outlet for lots of young writers to write stuff that people actually read (they get great traffic).

The quality varies given the almost absurd breadth of their coverage, but the main editors are smart cookies and cover more of the game globally than most blogs.It's not my favourite blog by any means, but it's not bad.

On a related note, it's no accident that OTFers aside, almost all the best football bloggers reside in North America; they're filling the hole in serious coverage of the game left by the mainstream media's ignorance/disdain of the sport (somewhat analogous in my mind to fanzines in England two decades ago).

[ursus arctos]

The Offside?

Goldstone, do you think that the club (or even player)-oriented nature of the Offside is a negative? I understand that it increases clicks (and therefore revenue), but to me it seems to encourage an us vs. them/fanboy/trash talk vibe that detracts from the worthwhile information the site can provide.

[Guest]

The Offside?

Goldstone--just checked out your Pitch Invasion blog, which is excellent stuff. In addition to your own great material there, you've also turned me on to Bill's Sports Maps, which has just consumed my afternoon. Between your blog, Sam's, and 200's , I feel spoilt for choice.

[goldstone97]

The Offside?

Ursus, I think that's true, and the proliferation of them makes it hard to follow and for the Offisde admins to keep tabs on quality across the board. I don't read many of the team blogs regularly, I have to say. And the new player blogs are a bit absurd, and real revenue chasers.

But for those in North America who follow teams elsewhere not in Britain, those blogs can be very valuable sources of information at times (I haven't read themt for a while, but I remember the Roma blog and the Italy blog being particularly good, as is the France blog. Of their American stuff, their Timbers blog is good, so's the Fire blog, and the NYRB one does original stuff).

In general, the main Offside blog is the only one I read regularly (and is perhaps also better as it's not merely a volunteer/unpaid position).

FCLymond, thanks for the kinds words, and Bill's Sports Map is really an outstanding endeavour people should check out.

By the way, Bigsoccer recently tried to get me to move Pitch Invasion there. An unlikely marriage that would have been.

I also recall that on the old board, we had a comprehensive thread listing football blogs worth reading that would be ideal for the likes of EIM to check over. Perhaps we should do that again here soon.

[ursus arctos]

The Offside?

The Italy editor left recently, which was quite a loss. She's been replaced by the Roma editor, but he is really too one-eyed to fill the role.

I tried to find the old thread this morning, but wasn't successful.

[My Name Is Ian]

The Offside?

I didn't mention you earlier, Tom, because I think that your contribution rather goes without saying (note to others - if Tom and I are discussing blogging and our opinions differ, listen to him rather than me). I don't read the individual blogs on The Offside because, well, I'm not terribly interested in the clubs concerned. Dam straight on Bill's Sports Maps, too. Someone should get him onto here.

Dotmund will be running 200% after the European Championships for a week or so, while I finally get around to giving the old place the make-over that it has been waiting two years for. Year Zero for the new season, and all that. I would say that, crikey, that Wordpress.org interface looks complicated. I'm sure I'll get used to it. I've reached a plateau with Blogger, though. The interface is too restrictive - every which way you try to work the style-sheet, it still always ends up looking like a Blogger site. I'll probably import the best of the old blog onto it, but probably not the whole thing.

Finally (for this little diatribe), I would add that there really are very few decent general sites about English football generally. There are very good blogs about more or less every other country that you can think of (MLS, in particular, is spoilt in this respect) and there are many blogs about the minutiae of it) but, off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful about English football that cover it with any breadth. Even Hobo Tread, one of my favourites, recently converted to being specifically about Havant & Waterlooville, which, while it is still a great read, feels like a loss of sorts to me.

[Kowalski]

The Offside?

There's a couple of good blogs on Welsh football.

http://welshfootball.blogspot.com/

and one by a member of this very board;

http://www.blogdroed.net/

[Incandenza]

The Offside?

twohundredpercent wrote:

Finally (for this little diatribe), I would add that there really are very few decent general sites about English football generally. There are very good blogs about more or less every other country that you can think of (MLS, in particular, is spoilt in this respect) and there are many blogs about the minutiae of it) but, off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful about English football that cover it with any breadth. Even Hobo Tread, one of my favourites, recently converted to being specifically about Havant & Waterlooville, which, while it is still a great read, feels like a loss of sorts to me.

This probably has all to do with the availability of commentary and news on these respective leagues in their country's media. MLS is still almost anonymous--the LA Times, the biggest newspaper in the only MLS market with two teams, doesn't send reporters to away games, instead having them watch the games on TV--so the blogs are not only helpful to fans looking for opinions, but they're crucial as far as news and commentary go.

[ursus arctos]

The Offside?

To revisit this for a moment, I would say that The Offside's Euro 2008 Blog is the site at its best, with quality material on just about every country.

Definitely worth a look.