Last Friday, I had an interesting conversation with a soccer blogger friend who had recently taken a plum editor job for a major soccer news website. The topic of discussion was a favourite of mine: what makes a truly great footy news site?
There’ll be a certain element of subjectivity in your response. Some prefer Zonal Marking’s in-depth tactical analysis. Others enjoy the great irreverent wit of someone like Dirty Tackle’s Brooks Peck. And still others like to bathe in acid and so visit BigSoccer.com. Most of us however tend to enjoy all these sites and more, coasting from page to page, either bookmarked on browser tabs or collated in RSS readers.
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But what about your football “homepage,” the one place you visit when you want a brief snapshot of the days football’s happenings, and sometimes can’t stop yourself from visiting several times a day (or hour)? For myself and a lot of friends and fellow writers that site tends to be Guardian Football, edited by Sean Ingle and featuring well-known columnists like Jonathan Wilson, Rob Smyth, Sid Lowe, Paolo Bandini, Rafael Honigstein—the list goes on. And we’re not alone; the site enjoys a significant global online following, including many readers from the US and Canada. So why after all these years does this Anglo-centric, London-based site still manage to attract so many soccer fans the world round?
The banal answer is they have great writers who cover a lot of ground, both within England and the rest of Europe. Yet there are talented soccer scribes at other websites, many who could write just as authoritatively on Serie A, the Bundesliga, or La Liga. However these tend to be scattered across a wide number of sites which the discerning reader must carefully comb through to discover. The Guardian features them all in one handy place.
That’s part of it, but there’s another element to the Guardian’s success that gets little airplay, perhaps because we take it for granted: many of their football writers expect a heaping amount of foreknowledge on the part of their readers. Rafa Honigstein or Sid Lowe write about their respective leagues not with an eye for introducing the cloistered English football fan to the “continental” game, but on the assumption their reader is just as knowledgeable on—and as fascinated by—the subject as they are.
The Guardian therefore bucks conventional English-language football writing wisdom, which holds it’s a good idea to exclusively about the top four English clubs, the more puff-piecey, the better (to be fair, the Guardian does provide this sort of thing on occasion). Many football editors think “average” fans would much rather see what amounts to their own opinions reflected back at them on the most popular teams or leagues of the day, rather than learn something new. The daily number of international visitors to the Guardian of course tells a different story.
What, I’m sure you’re asking now, does this have to do with Canadian soccer? I think part of the problem with a lot of mainstream press soccer writing in this country is that it’s too preoccupied with carefully introducing an outsider audience to the sport, rather than enjoying its own authoritative voice on the game. Smart writers like Stephen Brunt or Paul Attfield will resort to hyperbole to draw in the non-fan to a soccer story (Beckham saved MLS! RSL’s Morale’s goal was the most important in MLS history!), and even sports mad Sun Media will often provide milquetoast, paint-by-numbers analysis rather than truly challenging its readers.
Some North American soccer blogs go too far the other way, cramming in the detail but failing to tell a story. Like their press equivalents, these writers tend to unconsciously split their audience between the “hardcore” and the “outsiders” (I’ve been as guilty as anyone on that front) and provide facts without a sufficient reason for the reader to care about them.
I think what drives sports fans to sports writing, especially in this country, is a sense of inclusion. I can often get a better picture of what’s going on in the Bundesliga by reading one Rafa Honigstein piece than by watching an entire weekend’s slate of fixtures. In this country, one Benjamin Massey article is sufficient to fill me in on the mood among the Southsiders, better than all the Matchday Live repeats in the world. No one likes to be talked down to, and those in the know still need a reason to care.
In my experience, there is no such thing as an “average” Canadian soccer fan. I’m often humbled (and frightened) by the knowledge of fans of the game in this country, whether cab drivers, doctors, sales people, whatever. If we’re interested in drawing these fans to the Canadian game, we shouldn’t attempt to shut them out either by patronizing them, or proving them nothing but dry detail. An editor once told me, when a writer is in love with their subject, it shows. It excites the reader, even though they may not be aware of all the details of the subject they’re covering. We need to write the pieces we want to write, and stop worrying about the expectations of our audience. They’re grown-ups (for the most part). They can take it.