In the past few days, there have been rumours that Google and Apple are both considering a bid for the broadcasting rights to the Premier League when they come up for renewal later this year. They remain just that – rumours – and it seems likely that Apple won’t bid, while there is nothing to indicate yet that Google may consider making a sizeable investment in English football broadcast rights. But with both companies expected to move further into the TV and broadcasting industry, it does show other leagues and sports that it may be worth thinking outside the traditional broadcasting methods. Indeed, for some, it may be the only way to grow and survive.

Under the current broadcast rights deal, Sky is paying around £1.6bn to show 115 live Premier League games per season, with ESPN broadcasting the final package of games. Under a deal with the European Commission, the Premier League had to ensure that the six packages were divided between more than one broadcaster. That deal has now expired, although the Premier League is unlikely to risk another legal battle by awarding all games to Sky (or, more unlikely, another broadcaster).

The amounts of money involved are quite staggering and few broadcasters can afford them. Even lower down the English league pyramid structure, where rights are nowhere near as expensive, the cost of producing live games or even highlight shows are still high enough to be questionable in terms of cost-effectiveness. Due to budget cuts, the BBC opted not to show Football League highlights during the recent festive period, despite a full set of fixtures, while in non-League Premier Sports opted to pull out of screening Darlington versus Barrow last season rather than risk sending a crew to a game that stood a possibility of being called off.

And yet with the growth of the internet and the willingness over the past few seasons for broadcasters to snap up as many sport and football rights as possible, fans have been treated to a proliferation of football across a range of platforms to the extent that it’s almost expected that non-Premier League games and highlights will be if not free, then at least readily available. Never mind that football has had its fingers burnt twice in the past with the collapse of both ITV Digital and Setanta, the expectation is there.

This, however, overlooks the fact that if non-Premier League football was thought to be profitable for broadcasters, they would be rushing to show more of it. Ratings for ESPN’s foreign league coverage are low in the UK, while the expense involved for lower league games is high. That none of the commercial broadcasters other than Sky have made a serious play for these live matches in recent years tells its own story. Only the BBC, with its public service commitments, could make a sensible argument for broadcasting lower league football, and with their proposed Delivering Quality First cuts – especially around local radio commentaries – even Auntie appears to be scaling back lower league coverage.

This, then, is the state of football broadcasting in the UK at the moment. Rights for live Premier League games are so expensive to bid for that only a small handful of broadcasters – Sky, ESPN and, given their recent acquisitions of French rights, probably al-Jazeera – are able to offer the vast sums required, while the lower leagues are too expensive to produce to make a serious challenge to Sky for the rights (or, in the case of Premier Sports and their deal to broadcast non-League football, hardly enriching for the clubs involved).

Which is why looking outside of the traditional mediums could be seen as a good thing. For the Premier League, should Apple and Google, two companies with the financial clout to challenge Sky, decide to bid then it could herald the much-needed shake-up of the current near-monopoly on top flight rights. For lower leagues, exploring non-linear options are, quite simply, a must if they are to at least stand a chance of reaching existing fans and new audiences. A new generation of internet connected app-friendly televisions are on the way powered by familiar OS and Android platforms. While it may be a tad hyperbolic to proclaim these will change the way you watch TV forever, we’re already seeing the current generation of IPTVs having a slight shift on the way we consume our television. The world of streaming, tablets, phones and TV is amalgamating as one.

Of the realistic options, Apple appear to be the most curious of those rumoured. The tech company already has a deal in place with Sky to show archive footage through iTunes, while Sky’s successful Sky Go mobile and tablet apps currently offer a slick Premier League broadcasting experience on the iPhone and iPad.

Bidding for expensive UK Premier League rights would also represent something of a risk for Apple, given football’s standing in the US, although globally, given the Premier League’s appeal, it could prove to be a sound piece of business, especially in the long term if it secures the US rights to the competition given the growing appeal of the “EPL” on that side of the Atlantic. But any movement on this, if it were to materialise, would as likely depend on the offerings of Apple TV, how it develops and whether it becomes a mass-market product.

The search giant Google, however, would seem to be much more of a natural fit for broadcasting rights. They already own YouTube, which signed a two year deal to broadcast the Indian Premier League cricket. Under YouTube’s stewardship, the channel racked up a cool 50 million views. In comparison, current rights holder Times India’s channel, which is produced in conjunction with Google, has just under 15 millions views. The appetite and familiarity with well known sporting brands is, it appears, present online and is not discouraged by a non-traditional media company owning the rights.

For Google, the infrastructure (including Android), not to mention the money, is in place, although one complication may be the ongoing copyright dispute between the Premier League and YouTube. Google have also recently shed many extra projects as they get behind their core offerings (while continuing to innovate), and the video Hangouts on Google+ raise an interesting possibility of shared viewing experiences between friends or fans of clubs through special individual channels. There are so many possibilities for sports broadcasting on Google – be it TV, apps, online or social network – it would be easy to spend a whole article speculating on what these may be, but suffice to say the barriers offered by traditional broadcasters would be broken down should the leagues be willing to do so – itself a big sticking point.

It is also worth, briefly, considering Facebook. The social behemoth may not have been mentioned thus far but they have already shown that, on a smaller scale, they can very competently handle sports broadcasting. Budweiser and the FA’s streaming of the Extra Preliminary FA Cup Qualifying tie between Ascot United and Wembley FC may have been a one-off novelty but was a smooth, entertaining and enjoyable experience. Liking Budweiser’s page was a small price to pay for a professional broadcast and the online viewing figures of 27,000 were more than even ITV4 gets for some Europa League matches.

Facebook’s goal of being at the heart of everybody’s lives would fit with acquiring sports rights (especially as the majority of work making it broadcast-ready would probably be done by the partners). It is not hard to envisage live streaming of games through the social network or via the Facebook app on your TV. Again, the restrictions here are unlikely to be on Facebook’s part but from the Premier League or any other body selling their live broadcast rights.

For the Premier League, they have the luxury of picking and choosing, such is the strength and popularity of the product they are selling. Whether they’d be willing to relinquish their grip and allow any sort of fragmentation from the new media companies potentially interested in their rights is another question. For the lower leagues, it is up to them to seize the initiative.

What would the Football League be worth if the rights were sold to Facebook or Google? Would more people be inclined to subscribe or sign-up to an app on a new generation IPTV? Could revenue be raised through pay-per-view subscriptions as well as longer subscriptions? Would lower league or non-League games attract higher audiences if they were streamed via the official page on Facebook or via YouTube? And if these games were readily available to the casual lower league fan, what impact would this have on attendances? None of these questions are easy or even possible to answer, but need to be asked or considered, at the very least.

Or could we yet see a situation where it is not the league who negotiate the deal for the rights, but an enterprising club? Think of the individual rights that are negotiated by La Liga clubs in Spain, but then fragmented and offered to a range of platforms and tech or social companies, not the traditional broadcasters.

Already the individual leagues risk being left far behind when it comes to mobile or TV app development, if they have even considered it. Broadcasters and other companies know that mobile viewing – be it on a phone or tablet – will provide a significant market in the future. Whether the leagues are following suit is debatable.

We could potentially reach a point where an enterprising club with an abnormal fan base for the division they are in – say Luton or Bradford, for example – decide to cut out the middle man and go direct to Google and stream through the official Luton Town YouTube channel and offer special Luton Town viewing hangouts with post-match viewer-engaged content via Hangouts on Google+. Or perhaps the game will be streamed via the official Bradford City Facebook page and IPTV app, with all the social benefits that this brings, not to mention the marketing advantages such a channel offers to the club.

And if these lower league clubs are successful, the bigger clubs will almost certainly want their slice of the action. Perhaps we may face a future where you purchase the Facebook app but opt to watch through the dedicated Manchester City channel rather than the main broadcast, or a host of other fragmented options, while chatting to other fans of the same persuasion during the match. Fanciful? Perhaps. But you can already see the foundations of virtual stadiums just through this method, and this probably only discusses a small part of what could be achieved.

But this does get ahead of what would currently be required. For both Football League and Premier League clubs, there would need to be a majority vote to abandon the collective agreement on income from these football rights. To do so would be hugely controversial and go against the very fabric of the game in Britain. Yet with governing bodies often some way behind clubs and technology in both adoption and thinking, the question is how prepared clubs would be to miss out if a new route makes them more money.

Certainly the aforementioned Manchester City are already leading the way, digitally. Their website is rightly lauded as one of the best in the country and their YouTube channel is both slick and engaging. Should opportunities open up for exploiting online viewing, it is clubs such as City who are likely to be at the forefront. The infrastructure and planning is in place, it is just the league itself that prevents them from maximising their online potential in terms of use of live broadcasts and highlights.

Given football broadcast rights are complicated enough as it is, perhaps we may see another layer added for tablet or TV apps rather than channels accessed through a browser. Perhaps it is these clubs may look to exploit separately rather than collectively. Could online prove an exception and break the collective agreement? Technologically, there are many attractive and exciting reasons for doing so. Legally it may prove more different, and morally it does not sit comfortably with the idea of keeping the game competitive (and would, as likely, provoke a similar reaction to Liverpool’s executive Ian Ayre raising the notion of clubs individually negotiating their international broadcast rights).

Whether these changes in technology and broadcast viewing habits would improve top flight football, or simply serve to make it more tribal and take it further away from its roots is an another question, although one you feel the clubs and league won’t worry to much about if it proves successful, even if they are unable to negotiate individual rights. In an online medium very much concerned with openness and equality, any success in this area could serve to make the bigger clubs even richer. For the Premier League it’s a welcome addition to have on the table. For the smaller clubs, it may become a necessity.

It’s only days after Munich. Manchester United no longer have a first team. The Manchester United board’s decision to pull the plug on the club for the season seems understandable.

Jimmy Murphy expresses his disappointment, and takes a puff on his cigarette, listening to the reasoning presented to him by the board. The Manchester United assistant coach is representing the playing side alone, with Busby still hospitalised in Munich. They tell him nobody could put together a new team with just days until United’s next game.

“I can do it.” Jimmy says, straightforwardly.

“It can’t be done,” the Chairman of the board replies.

It’s now that Murphy’s earnest passion and determination displays itself.

“Don’t tell me what can’t be done,” Murphy replies. “When Matt Busby brought me here they told me we’d never make a go of it, that it couldn’t be done. That Manchester United would never make a success. Told us we couldn’t win the league playing kids. Told us we couldn’t match the best teams in Europe. And every bloody time we proved them wrong, so with respect sir, it can be done, it will be done, I’ll make sure of it.”

The previous scene had shown Bobby Charlton giving up on football: his box of boots, posters and balls placed tearfully outside the back of his house for anyone to take.

United is about the plane crash that led to that despair but it’s not about Charlton or Busby or Edwards, it’s about Jimmy Murphy, who is portrayed as the golden thread that kept the club united in the wake of an unbelievable tragedy.

Busby’s babes before the crash are portrayed as Murphy’s men – boys that he moulded into characters strong enough to win the league as kids, both on and off the field. It’s Murphy who tells Charlton to kick a ball against a wall at Old Trafford for an hour a day until he develops his left foot as well as his right. It’s Murphy on the training field in the pissing rain with the players, cheekily telling Duncan Edwards he’s almost good enough to play for Wales:

It’s Murphy giving a nervous Charlton a pep-talk on the Old Trafford pitch:

And it’s Murphy who, to return to the smoky boardroom, keeps Manchester United going.

“Because how we are in the future will be founded on how we behave today,” he tells the board. “Any questions?”

The focus on Murphy seems to be the cause of Sandy Busby’s ire – Matt Busby’s son was incensed that Busby was not shown in a tracksuit, not portrayed affably. But the fact is, Busby is besides the point to this story: the story of Jimmy Muphy. Busby has been lionised, always will be lionised, and quite rightly so. Murphy, on the other hand, has been a footnote to history, the assistant who was thrust into the leadership role with Busby’s absence after the Munich disaster (Murphy had missed the flight because he was away coaching Wales), the assistant who always had done more than anyone outside Old Trafford knew.  This Independent piece by Ian Herbert from around the 50th anniversary of Munich explains:

Murphy was, as Sir Bobby Charlton put it, “a brilliant teacher of players, but he didn’t want to command”. Perhaps that explains, as United prepare to mark the 50th anniversary, the sense among some around Old Trafford that Murphy has not been remembered as he might for his part in managing United through the days of impoverished struggle and, as Charlton remembers it, “panic” when the club attempted to rebuild after Munich.

United, unlike in future days, did not have enormous resources for Murphy to fall back in the days after the disaster. The coffins from Muncih were laid out Old Trafford’s gymnasium, polished by laundry room staff. Herbert continues:

In this scene of devastation, Jimmy Murphy’s great powers of judgement and humanity were to serve him well. Busby would be able to sign Denis Law from Torino for a club record £115,000 in 1962, but Murphy had to decide which youth team players to cast into the fray as United struggled to fulfil fixtures and which to buy when the league gave them special dispensation to bring some in. Ernie Taylor, Blackpool and England inside forward and Stan Crowther, a tough tackler from Aston Villa, were shrewd buys.

Murphy also convinced Billy Foulkes, who survived Munich, he could make the step up to club captain after Roger Byrne’s death. “Billy said: ‘I can’t do it and I won’t do it’,” Murphy’s son recalls. “My father said: ‘You can and you will’. That’s what my dad was like. He had this knack of picking people and he was usually proved right.”

Within three months Murphy had taken United to the FA Cup final at Wembley, an achievement perhaps as great in the circumstances as the win over Benfica there a decade later.

50 years on, the sense that Murphy’s story has been untold can be put to rest thanks to United.

So, in summary, a partnership between online newspapers and blogs—for example, an online network linked on a football mainpage with rotating featured posts—comes with both potential advantages and drawbacks.

For bloggers, a network could provide a bigger readership and a closer working relationship with an expert newspaper editorial staff who could pitch story angles or offer general advice. Depending on the advertising model in place, it could also provide potentially higher revenue incentives to keep invest the time and energy necessary to maintain a top quality site, and motivate writers to build blogs worthy of joining one of these networks, improving the current standard above the eyeball-hungry, SEO shlock banner ad approach. For newspapers, a blog network can offer readers a much wider area of coverage, global perspectives, differing opinions, historical analysis than a single newsroom could produce on its own. It could also provide lower-cost content on the web, should news organizations decide to make news content available only through paid Smart Phone or iPad-like apps.

The drawbacks, however, are significant. For newspapers, a network would rob overseers of direct editorial control, leaving the possibility for some major legal department snafus. For bloggers too, the arrangement might cede more control to advertisers and newspapers. As someone who hasn’t put up an ad banner yet in three years going, I completely understand.

But any talk of newspaper/blog coops is just pipe-dreamery if there there’s no money to be made, and for that reason I think it’s important to leave this final part to a discussion about the absolutely woeful state of online advertising, especially with regard to football blogging. Keep in mind, this is going to be a low-tech breakdown; the issue is with philosophy, not mechanics.

Currently, advertising through blogs is fairly low-maintenance. The model is simple, generalized across the board, and easy to start up. If you have a Blogger blog for example, you can sign up for AdSense and watch as the pennies roll in from the rare wayward ad clicks from your reading audience. Or perhaps you want to be connected to advertisers in search of blogs of a particular kind. Well, Ahmed Bilal does a bang-up job helping out soccer bloggers with his Football Media ad network. But even with the narrower focus on content-appropriate advertisers, you’re still stuck with these two options—banner ads, meaning the more “Wayne Rooney is a Fuckhead” stories, the more clicks, the more revenue; or “Social Advertising,” which essentially means astroturfing your posts (the blogging equivalent of this).

This kind of advertising is built on the Necessary Nuisance model. You want to watch the newest episode of your favourite TV show? Go to a newly-released movie? Walk downtown? Watch a popular YouTube vid? Listen to top 40 radio? Read a magazine or a newspaper? You have to deal with ads. Advertisers don’t care as much if you hate them, because the endgame is not necessarily consumption (a common mistake among anti-consumerist lefties, incidentally). The end game is product awareness, which helps consolidate brand loyalty. Ads legitimize brand, which comes in handy for producers when you’re at the grocery store buying one of the several thousand deodorants on sale.

This kind of advertising this is usually expensive to produce and sell. We know the famous line about ads costing more than the shows they appear on than the show itself. And selling print ad space in the analog age, as we know now apres le deluge, was (and still is) the primary source of revenue for both newspapers and magazines. Yet the high costs are justified; while TV shows and magazines are expensive to produce, the networks and media conglomerates share a much larger portion of their respective markets than an individual blogger floating on the interweb, and therefore get a lot of eyeballs by default (e.g. two national papers in Canada, three major networks). And the bigger the content-producers’ chunk of the media consumer pie (measured in ratings, circulation), the more they can charge advertisers for access to said chunk. The system works!

The online incorporation of this model is, on the surface, ingenious. Contrary to other media, banner ads and widgets are often cheap to produce (and cheap looking), and endlessly reproducible. Pretty much anyone can put them up on their site, and because of the miracle PPC and CPM, the onus is on the individual blogger to get in the necessary eyeballs to generate more revenue. No clumsy Nielson ratings, no circulation statistics. You take an hour to post something up, a reader takes thirty seconds to give you a page impression, and five seconds to click on an ad. Clink, penny in a cup. The more eyeballs you get, the more clinks you get.

But there is a major problem: this model works against the essence of what makes the internet the internet. No, it’s not memes or viral videos or any of that HuffPo hooey. To put it simply, it’s diversity. While many of us would be content to visit Slate, Gawker, Boing Boing and the Huffington Post before calling it a day, there are many online readers who prefer something more personalized to their tastes. Some prefer even more specialization within their chosen niche. Even though the bloggers who attract these like-minded readers might get fewer uniques (meaning, under the current model, less penny clinks), they carry a significant level of value for a producer with a niche product geared toward a particular demographic (educated, psychic, Japanese, whatever). Some of these producers don’t have much of an ad budget, and never have.

Some bloggers have already realized this and formed their own ad networks. Yet bloggers aren’t in the ad business, and don’t have the time, resources or energy to pitch to companies that aren’t used to doing much advertising beyond word of mouth at all. Ad companies don’t have the resources (finance and time) either to deal with a myriad of different blogging networks, each focusing on a niche within a niche. Much better to deal with a single ad department at a newspaper, for example. This is obviously where a newspaper blog network could come in handy, but I think the real key difference is the noise filter that newspapers could provide.

There is a reason why Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” is one of the most popular blogs on the internet—it is an incredible filter for the most relevant political and cultural happenings of the moment. But Sullivan’s blog is still a general colloquium featuring this and that interesting article or video; most of the time, a lay reader who wants to get into a particular subject, like football history for example, will have to try using Google to find blogs suited to her tastes. She might click on the top-rated site, which could be great, or, could be crap. Maybe there are also countless other sites she might find interesting, but she’ll have to dedicate a lot of time on the web, carefully looking among blog link lists and compiling her own personal network of top football history blogs. After awhile, she might go extra mile and set up an elaborate system of RSS feeds or bookmarks or saved browser tabs. But at this point, she’ll probably have to be a hardcore football history nerd to keep this effort up.

What if I just want to get an overview of the best sites covering a particular angle on a particular topic? Where do I go to find what I’m looking for? Newspapers would go beyond self-appointed networks in that they provide key editorial oversight, oversight that would likely reflect the readership of the paper (quite a different list of football blogs you’d see on the Sun than on the Guardian). And as these networks attract more online newspaper readers interested in particular subjects, trusting in the editorial judgment and brand behind the selection, the value of these readers for advertisers despite their smaller numbers, increases. And that doesn’t just (or at all) mean the big brand, product legitimacy advertisers—that means advertisers working on behalf of much smaller, niche companies, to get people to directly buy a particular product. And the product ad might not even be a nuisance; depending on the specialization, it may be something these blog readers want to buy. EFW readers might want cheap flights from Gatwick to Barcelona; Run of Play readers might want to buy a copy of the latest Football Manager, or a subscription to WSC.

This is the value I think the web provides, a value that it has yet to take advantage of. I think a partnership between newspapers and blogs, especially in football, could form a group of dedicated, special interest readers. But I think the movement in making this happen has to come from advertisers. Perhaps as more money goes into online advertising, we might see this kind of thing, or perhaps the money will go into making flashier videos that obstruct text and clutter websites. It’s an idea, anyway. Thanks for reading.

Image credit: burtonwood + holmes.

This series came about in part from a post from the not-so-anonymous-anymore blogger, Fake Sigi, which discussed the post rate on Pitch Invasion since the end of the summer, especially in light of the editor’s new column at BigSoccer. FS wrote:

My main concern was that Tom [Dunmore] would start posting more and more at BigSoccer, leaving Pitch Invasion to slowly decompose. From my experience, it’s hard enough to maintain one web writing medium when you’re not a hard core freelancer. And mostly those fears turned out to be unfounded through July when Pitch Invasion posted something on the order of nearly three new articles a day.

And then Tom went on short “week-long” hiatus on August 12, and Pitch Invasion has for all intents and purposes gone dark since then.

From there, FS goes on to say—to use an expression that jumped the shark years ago—PI has jumped the shark. So I spoke to Tom about the drop-off in the rate of posts here, and he put it this way:

It’s really rather simple…I was finishing writing a 400 page soccer book and running the Chicago Fire’s Independent Supporters’ Association…the former took up about 20 hours a week, the latter 40 hours a week, and I blasted out a few BigSoccer pieces for some $ as well, in part for the cash, in part for the interest of reaching a new audience. And I also have a life!

Plus [PI contributors, including yours truly] eased up post-WC on PI too so the site lost its regular momentum.  I guess at the end of the day, it’s not a successful business (nor was it ever meant to earn full-time income for anyone) and it’s not going to run itself when nobody has 30 hours a week to work on it for very little $ reward.  At the end of the day, I’d rather run nothing on it than run low quality crap.

And there you have it: one major pitfall for any successful blog (and blogger) is the lack of any solid financial return on what can be an enormous investment of time and energy (it’s a “hustle,” as Jason Davis wrote). And it’s not as if there is money awaiting the hard-working blogger down the long and windy road, outside of using the blog as a platform for almost invariably better-paying external freelance work. Needless to say, Dunmore, nor anyone (save me on occasion) has anything to apologize for with regard to Pitch Invasion’s contribution to independent football writing. The problem is that for most of us (hi Brooks!) right now, blogging is for the most part its own reward. Which is why so many great blogs, even those loaded with up PPC banners and decent ad deals and a bunch of subscriptions, will eventually start to peter out, oh, say, around the three year mark.

For some, this isn’t actually a problem at all. Blogs are great in part because of the low threshold involved in starting up. Anyone can get a domain on Blogger or WordPress and hang their dirty footballing laundry out to dry for millions to read (or not read). And anyone can just as easily stop posting, often with nobody the wiser. This is in many ways what makes blogs great. They live and die in the moment, they have their time, and then they cease to be relevant. Then someone else fills in the empty space, although never in quite the same way.

Other writers question whether there is any intrinsic financial worth in blogging at all. Local Kings Cross blogger William Perrin, quoted in the Alan Rusbridger lecture I keep banging on about, believes there isn’t anything about independent journalism that “deserves” remuneration:

[The site] costs us about £11 a month in cash, which is about three of four pints of beer … we have a very strong community of people around here who send us stuff. None of the people who work with me are journalists. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination; it’s an entirely volunteer effort … Some people what I do in my community some people label journalism, it’s a label I actually resist.

Indeed, once you add the expectation of post-rates, editorial control, the concerns of a legal department, and the expectation you will always cover a certain topic in a certain way—all, by the way, possible elements of any network blog/newspaper partnership—well, it’s not blogging anymore, is it?

With some of these questions this in mind, I spoke with a successful blogger who is already branching out into a major media organization with his Guardian Chalkboards feature, Zonal Marking author Michael Cox. I asked him if he thought ZM would continue unaffected even with the prospect of further outside work, and whether he thought there was any incentive for blogs and media orgs to cooperate:

Yes, ZM will continue, really the Guardian stuff is irrelevant from that point of view – not to do it down, it’s great and a privilege to do, but but doesn’t really change the way I operate. I just do a column for them on Monday mornings, and will happily go in for the podcast if I’m invited back, but ZM is still my main task. There hasn’t really been any change in it now that I’m working for a ‘bigger’ publication.

I suppose it depends if the blog can sustain itself on its own financially (through other means than through a link with a mainstream organisation). If not, then the blogger will probably be forced to either accept money from a publication (in which case editorial control might suffer, understandably) or they’ll just work full-time for the newspaper and do the blog as an ‘extra’. But that’s not really the case here – ZM’s got me a chance to write for the Guardian but now that’s me doing it, not Zonal Marking being featured on the Guardian.

Cox, like most football bloggers, considers his blog an end in itself. When I started my own site, A More Splendid Life, I deliberately intended it to be an experimental platform for my own football writing, just to see if I could do it. After a while though, it took on a life of its own. Even when it was in my best interest to stop, I kept going because people kept reading; I didn’t feel it was right to just kill it off. To this day, I have often contemplated chucking it out entirely and starting my own personal site featuring writing on a host of different topics, but I don’t want to wreck AMSL as a soccer-only site.

The sense of your blog as an autonomous creation is a powerful motivation to keep going, but it over the long haul it is no match for sustainable financial incentives. Even if you’re wildly successful at blogging, additional freelance work will sap your energy and resources. A very small percentage of individual bloggers might get bought or “sponsored” by print pubs, able to maintain the creative and editorial control they had before, but the reality is most independent football writers will either hand over the reigns to someone else, cut down on the post rate, or just stop. That might not be necessarily a bad thing, but when readers come to rely on certain sites to provide coverage on a topic badly neglected by mainstream media organizations with finite resources, the loss of an excellent independent blog leaves a marked gap. While most football bloggers have more than a little William Perrin in them, it’s worth considering that establishing a means for providing sustainable financial rewards for bloggers might not necessarily corrupt the spontaneity, freedom and creativity of the medium.

Image Credit: CarbonNYC.

There is a pervasive trend in some big media organizations—especially in my home country Canada, with two national dailies and two major national broadcasters, one public, one private—to become more “relevant” by offering content perceived to be attractive to a wider circle of readers/viewers/listeners. The public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has for example in recent years moved toward producing ratings-driven drama programs on their main television network (and has been quite successful at it, although one wonders what the underlying reason is for this approach when the other private network broadcaster CTV essentially provides the same programming, and has done for years), and revamped their classical music channel to include more “indie rock,” singer-songwriter content during the work day for the underrepresented urban hipster office set.

Similarly, the national newspaper The Globe and Mail moved to a new print design closely resembling the Guardian, although with what seems like about half the written content, a greatly expanded Style section, and more knee-jerk editorials and graphical tchotchkes masquerading as columns. In both instances, the redesigns seem driven more by zealous MBA graduates more attuned to reacting to data from group studies, telephone surveys, and demographic shifts, the kind of people who obsess over reading the widest possible tastes of media consumers.

The Guardian online meanwhile is still figuring out what to do with a mass of readers from outside their borders, particularly in Canada and the US, who have fled ugly, floating cursor video ads, anti-intuitive layouts, or the multiple page newspaper article redumps on nytimes.com, and found a new home at guardian.co.uk. With a wide variety (emphasis emphasis!) of interesting international stories, blogs and articles tailor-made for internet reading (and a nice, well-spaced font), careful, non-intrusive use of video embedding, the Guardian site seems designed by people who use the internet—again, it’s not just an adjunct to the newspaper, or an over-monetized flash ad animation dumping ground. Once more, it’s worth returning to Alan Rusbridger’s excellent Hugh Cudlipp lecture (although the video links are all broken in a nice bit of irony). If you haven’t already, take the time to read the whole thing. But let’s focus in on this quote:

During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40% more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company – you know, the ones that should admit the game’s up because they are so irrelevant and don’t know what they are doing in this new media landscape – has grown its audience by 40% in a year. More Americans are now reading the Guardian than read the Los Angeles Times. This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000.

Nor is all this being bought by tricks or by setting chain-gangs of reporters early in the morning to re-write stories about Lady GaGa or Katie Price. In that same period last year, our biggest growth areas were environment (up 137%), technology (up 125%) and art and design (up 84%). Science was up 81%; politics 39% and Comment is Free 38%.

I think it’s worth having a look again at that figure once more—$34, 000. In addition of course to the growth percentages in areas of the news other online news sites have long neglected (science, design etc.) And if you want to point to the Guardian’s healthy endowment as proof others could not have gone down this online content route, here’s Rusbridger again: “Our first decade of digital growth wasn’t subsidised by the Scott Trust – it was relatively modest and covered by the profits of the paper.”

In other words, the Guardian’s online success is largely built on old fashioned content. But not, importantly, content merely transferred verbatim from print to online. Guardian Football for example works to provide content tailor made for online readers who already share a good deal of knowledge of their subject, and the key features of Guardian Football—the Joy of Six, the Knowledge, the Chalkboard analysis—reflect the reality that most online readers already know what they’re looking for. These readers are in perpetual search for more specialized content in one or more areas—politics, sport, science, whatever. The Guardian is successful because it provides content that assumes a particular level of knowledge on the readers behalf, i.e. it respects that its readers have sought the content out, rather than glanced over it after picking up the paper off a subway seat (this respect is perhaps one of the reasons why it employs few of the patronizing football analysts found in other UK broadsheets—you know who they are).

Therefore, a partnership between the Guardian and the more reliable, independent specialized football bloggers makes a lot of sense. While this relationship has been ongoing at the Guardian, in part through the “Favourite Things” section on the Football main site and through the Observer Premier League fan round-up, during the 2010 World Cup it came to fruition with the “Guardian Fans’ Network“, an attempt to have bloggers fill in content gaps inevitable in covering a thirty-two nation tournament. I asked Guardian Sport editor Sean Ingle for his thoughts on the project:

We had two primary objectives when we launched the Guardian Fans’ Network: first, to tap into the talent and expertise of our readers and second, to build a network of experts in all 32 countries. We have long realised that guardian.co.uk is a global news organisation but it’s only more recently that we have made the logical next step … ie given our finite resources, we can’t cover everything so therefore it makes sense to involve our readers more often. For the World Cup it was always going to be impossible for us to cover the reaction in, say, Honduras if they beat Spain or in Ghana when they reached the quarter-finals.

The fans’ network enabled us to do that – our network of 125 supporters in all 32 countries represented in South Africa tweeted regularly, sent us leads, pitched for paid commissions and even sent us photographs of how the World Cup was celebrated where they were. The whole process wasn’t perfect; some of the blogs were patchy and I wish we had had more time to suggest tweaks and rewrites. Also some of our planned graphically wizardry didn’t come off – we simply ran out of time. But on the whole it was a success.

In other words, the network built on what was already one of the key strengths of the Guardian Online: specialization. But here you can already see some of the drawbacks with this kind of partnership. First, there’s the unavoidable lack of editorial control that comes with ceding online space to outsiders. Second, while I think a successful newspaper/blogger network would have to respect the autonomy of bloggers in choosing what they write about and how they write it (more on that tomorrow), there are legal issues about what gets published, issues that could be insurmountable, especially in the UK with its stringent libel laws. Third, while a blog network on a newspaper site might produce more income for bloggers through a number of different schemes (network sponsorships, or “micro-advertizing,” smaller companies selling niche product directly to readers of highly-specialized blogs), newspaper writers could reasonably argue to their bosses that these kinds of networks erode wages for staff and freelancers.

These drawbacks need to be very carefully looked at, and some could be insurmountable stumbling blocks to any projects of this type. But there is good reason to think this route might be inevitable. Here’s another little bit from Rusbridger’s lecture that Ingle specifically highlighted to me:

We are edging away from the binary sterility of the debate between mainstream media and new forms which were supposed to replace us. We feel as if we are edging towards a new world in which we bring important things to the table – editing; reporting; areas of expertise; access; a title, or brand, that people trust; ethical professional standards and an extremely large community of readers. The members of that community could not hope to aspire to anything like that audience or reach on their own; they bring us a rich diversity, specialist expertise and on the ground reporting that we couldn’t possibly hope to achieve without including them in what we do.

Ingle elaborates a little on this when it comes to Guardian Sport:

There will be always be some difference between papers and bloggers – the latter are unlikely to be able to go to every big game, get off-the-record briefings from managers and club staff etc – but the gap has narrowed considerably over recent years. For instance, Michael Cox from zonalmarking.net does our chalkboards and has appeared on our Football Weekly podcast while the Observer have a fans’ network in which you can read what supporters of Premier League teams made of their team’s latest performance.

The gap has narrowed, the format for a growing partnership already exists. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Michael Cox of Zonal Marking and discuss some of the advantages and drawbacks from the perspective of bloggers, and Wednesday we’ll conclude the series with a summary and a look at where we go from here.

Image Credit: Mike Bailey-Gates.

So today, the meat and potatoes as it were of this series: what might more cooperation between independent blogs and on-line newspaper football sites actually look like? Before I dive in, I think it’s important to point out that I’m not going to lay out concrete models with specific revenue streams and publishing formats, but rather point out general features that would make a union more desirable than the current situation, where the only mutual connection between newspapers and blogs comes in the form of hyperlinks.

I should also mention that discussion of the obstacles to this kind of union will be examined at length in a future post, but feel free to start shredding in the comments.

It’s about revenue, stupid.

Let’s get down to it: do well-written, exciting, original football blogs carry any inherent monetary value? I’m going to be flashy and controversial and say, in and of themselves, probably not. A writer can build a brilliant football site, gain lots of readers, carry a lot of blog “influence” as measured by one or another social media yardstick. But based on the extraordinarily diffuse nature of blogs, most of the time advertisers doesn’t have much incentive to go beyond a low-cost CPM or CPC banner ad or feed approach that rewards views and views alone and doesn’t much care about quality. And even the most successful soccer blogs will only ever have a limited share of the eyeballs, unless they start churning out the SEO goods like Wayne Rooney stories, Drogba stories, WAGS, you get the idea.

Okay then, maybe your football blog has a good-sized, dedicated readership, and you want to try the donation route, either providing all of the content for free and asking kindly for money from your readers in return, or withholding portions or the entirety of your blog (essentially a partial or whole hog paywall). That won’t work either, in part because of the diffuse nature of football blogs mentioned above, but also because of what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “weak-ties” problem with on-line communities in his controversial New Yorker article, “Small Change.”

While Gladwell specifically targets Twitter and Facebook activism, his remarks regarding the weak ties that bind online communities can be applied to the ties that bind blogs with their readers. I might read your football blog everyday, come to love it, and come to expect a regular post-rate. But if you put your posts up behind a paywall, or offer “exclusive posts” for free, chances are most of your readers won’t pay. A small enough percentage might, but not at too exorbitant a price. This small percentage may match or even exceed the CPM CPC model while not having to depend as much on the number of eyeballs, which is good, but I’d say for most bloggers donations alone are not really financially sustainable (if anyone of you has had great success with the donation model, feel free to call me out).

The power of filters

Typically, the “bajillion blogs” nature of the web has always been regarded as a problem to be solved, not as an opportunity to be taken advantage of, particularly by advertisers. As I laid out yesterday, football is poised to take advantage of the plethora of sites out there, in part because of the demand, at some time or another, for blogs with a specific football focus. Now, the one positive you tend to hear about the “bajillion blogs” problem is that good blogs rise to the surface. It’s not a coincidence that great blogs like Run of Play, Fake Sigi, Zonal Marking, Les Rosbifs, EFW, MFUSA, and a whole whack of others tend to get noticed, linked-to, talked about. But as I wrote yesterday, even as well-regarded as these sites are, they’re still essentially independent, working their way through the online world alone (which is fine, really and truly).

What if some of these sites though decided to go it alone and form a network? It’s my view that a blogging network isn’t much worth it if you’re going to go down the banner ad route. You might get a few more clicks, and some more pennies in a cup, but the added cost of organizing how ad revenues are split, getting your tax information in order, recruiting advertisers, trying to reach consensus won’t really make it worth it. Plus, with banner ads you’re still fundamentally stuck with the quantity over quality approach to generating revenue.

Okay then, if not banner ads, then what?  Well, probably something else entirely, but let’s interrupt for a second and take a look at a quote from Alan Rusbridger’s recent Hugh Cudlipp lecture (sent to me by Guardian sport editor Sean Ingle in relation to this series, who we’ll be hearing from later). This is Sir Martin Sorrell, head of the WPP marketing group.

“I would hope that within five years, so let’s say 2013, or something like that, we would be at least one third in digital. We know that customers are spending 20% of time online. So if clients are spending 12% and consumers are spending 20% – and I’ve seen some evidence to suggest they are spending more than 20% – then there’s a natural gravitational pull to 20% of the budgets being spent online … my guess is that when we get to a third of our business in 2014 we may very well want to up that percentage to 40% or even 50%.”

It’s my guess that as more and more marketing firms dedicate more and more financial resources to the web, the industry leaders will have to go beyond the CPM CPC, widget or banner ad models mentioned above. Those models exist on the old magazine model, where print ads sit next to print articles. Most of the time this is a very clumsy approach. As almost all of you still reading at this point are football bloggers, you’ll know how inept most advertisers are, especially in the aftermath of the 2010 World Cup. A company spending 10% of its money on web ads isn’t going to be able to go much beyond spamming the crap out of a bunch of football bloggers whose work bears no relation to the product, asking for widgets and banners and for ghosted posts or asking you to mention their product in a post as “naturally as possible” for a piddling one time fee. They don’t have the resources or the incentive right now to push beyond that model. But I think that will likely have to change.

Toward a new kind of web advertising

This, oddly enough, is where newspapers come in. Newspapers, despite budget cuts and all the rest, still have ad departments. These departments are dedicated to selling ads for both print and on-line editions. Newspapers also have the advantage of being trusted brands. Particular advertisers go with particular papers because they have a certain readership. The Globe and Mail has ads for mutual funds and Tiffany diamonds, while the Sun has pullout flyers for the Brick discount furniture store.

Right now, online ads don’t go much beyond their print paper equivalents in terms of form and function. It’s still a surface ad, even though when you click it you get taken to a third party site. Advertisers don’t much mind, because what they’re concerned with isn’t whether or not you go out and buy the product based on the ad, but that the general readership is aware the product exists. But what if, as a newspaper, you could offer an advertiser the chance to sponsor a set of blogs with a set of dedicated readers who, because of education, geographical location, are much more likely to purchase a set of particular products than a more general audience of readers? What if, instead of banner ads, you tried a less-intrusive sponsorship deal? Perhaps you could rent out these sponsorships on a rotating basis? What if larger advertising firms set up a means of allowing a traditionally smaller company with a limited ad budget to sponsor with sites that attract readers who are much more likely to buy their specific product? Like a product these readers might actually really like to buy? Like for example, football books?

This could all be completely unfeasible. But there are number of incentives for particular papers to go down this route. For one, there is a reason writers like Jonathan Wilson write for the Guardian and the Independent, and not the Sun. And there is a reason that Wilson’s association with these papers means he is one of the most trusted voices in football (imagine him as an independent blogger, slogging away columns on 4-5-1 on Lobanovsky on some WordPress template somewhere). Papers sell their readers to advertisers. Good independent soccer blogs tend to attract particular kinds of readers in good numbers, and if these bloggers are attached to a major traditional outlet, it puts the power of the paper’s brand behind them. It increases reader trust, strengthens the “weak ties” endemic on the web, and provides a trusted filter for football information which is what on-line papers tend to do anyway (see yesterday’s post).

Moreover, many papers are mulling over switching their hard news content over to paid-for smart phone, or iPad-like apps. If that model becomes the basis for most news providers to secure payment-for-content, their shadow WWW sites aren’t going away—and bloggers could help fill in this content gap. A series of blog networks linked to a newspaper main page with several rotating feature posts awarded to bloggers based on editorial merit. Think of it as a kind of like a much-expanded Guardian Favourite Things, split into blogs of a specific type, with rotating sponsors.

Final caveat

I don’t want want to get into the specifics of what this all might look like, like how much bloggers would earn from this kind of deal, what would a network hub would specifically look like. I just want to establish that there may more possibility and incentive for newspapers and blogs to work together than is publicly acknowledged. I’m not Faith Popcorn, and I’m not a marketing expert. To that end, over the next several posts, I’m going to be examining both the pros and cons for newspapers and bloggers in joining this kind of set-up. I want to establish that there are very real reasons why we might not move substantially past the status quo, but that we shouldn’t necessarily assume that, as Spock might put it, everyone in blogging, in newspapers and in advertising is continuing to perform admirably when it comes to exploiting the nature of their medium.

Image credit: Stuck in Customs.

Image Credit www.flickr.com/photos/marcp_dmoz/

Before I get into what a model partnership between football blogs and on-line newspapers might look like, or whether a such a partnership would be worth the hassle at all, I think it’s important to point out why football journalism in particular could be a leader in fomenting any further on-line cooperation. With that in mind, I think it’s worth discussing why successful online newspaper sports sections in general are starting to look at blogs as a potential partner, rather than an inferior competitor.

Why Sports Journalism?

More than any other section of the newspaper, the actual reported “news” in the sports pullout is probably the most redundant in light of both television and the internet.

Look at any newspaper. The front section of the New York Times reveals in-depth reporting on the “vanishing elderly” in Japan, the result of thousands of unreported deaths due to families attempting to maintain generous state pensions for older citizens. The Life section of the Globe and Mail reports on a new study on the strong connection between adequate sleep and weight-loss. In both instances, even when the content is reprinted verbatim on-line and in the actual print edition, you learn something you didn’t already know. In other words, you’re still the getting “the news” from newspapers.

Meanwhile, the Sports section of the Toronto Star features a box score of the hockey game you watched yesterday, game reports on tennis matches that you watched the highlights for twelve hours ago, and a short AP round-up of the Champions League that you’ve already read about in greater depth across several blogs and on-line overseas papers the day before. In other words, unlike her sister sections, the bulk of primary news reporting for the traditional Sports Page is, in the age of satellite television and access to multiple on-line sports sections and crappy illegal on-line feeds, already available to pretty much anyone anywhere, as it happens. In real time!

Casual sports fans with a newspaper subscription will always appreciate having all the sports happenings from the day before reprinted in one handy section. But the hardcore sports demographic—the kind who love all sports and one or two sports truly madly deeply—tend to rely on a dozen or so online sports sections in between watching Gol (or Golf) TV all day. And these are (or at least should be) the target demographic for sports advertisers.

The online newspaper sports section does however provide these sports fans with three key areas of value: trusted niche commentary, behind-the-scenes in-depth sports reporting, and a trusted filter for relevant information pertaining to news for a particular sport. The first tends to be of value only when it offers an authoritative summary of a particular area of the game uncovered in the same way by anyone else, the second is still the best thing newspapers provide in the sporting world today, and the third provides a filter for sports fans who don’t want to trawl nine-hundred sites to get the news they need, quickly. But all of these strengths could be well complimented with strong independent sports blogs in ways we’ll look at later.

Okay then, why Football Journalism and not Backgammon Journalism?

Because football is a global sport.

To avoid getting all misty-eyed and Geleano-ish, let’s define what that means in negative terms, i.e., what football isn’t, e.g. the NFL, MLB, NBA, NFL etc. These leagues are the single elite-level professional organizations for their respective sports, and they are all situated in the the continental US and southern Canada. That means most of the relevant in-depth news (prospective pros, farm leagues, drafts etc.) is limited to a single geographical area and as such tend to be already well-covered by American (and Canadian) sportswriters who, if they don’t write for any of the surviving American dailies in regional markets or Canadian national papers, scribble for sites and mags like SI, ESPN, the Hockey News, etc. These sports also feature a good-sized compliment of highly-active bloggers, some of whom do interesting things, sometimes extremely interesting things (Free Darko), but the room for sports bloggers to offer sports fans added value is inherently limited. There is, after all, only one NBA.

Football on the other hand has a bajillion professional leagues who are all in constant competition to be called the “best”, and it’s not usual for a handful of leagues to capture widespread interest in a single domestic market (on a given Saturday Toronto offers up MLS, Serie A, La Liga, Primera Division, the Ee Pee El etc.). Football’s biggest tournament features thirty-two nations who qualify in five federations comprising 208 national football associations. Elite players develop in Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, Russia, Argentina, and yes, sometimes even Canada, and go on to play in any number of different leagues, from Bogota, Columbia to Columbus, Ohio. There is also a wide rage of subsidiary areas to cover in football, from on-field tactics, international qualifying groups and formats, fan culture, back-room team politicking, a wide and confusing variety of professional sports laws, multinational team ownership, local football history. Because of the increasing global make-up of the elite leagues, and because of ubiquitous internationals, all of this news is of interest to some football fans, somewhere, at some time or another.

Time and financial resources prevent any single major media organization from covering this massive area of news, but the appetite among international football fans is voracious. That’s why, more and more, it’s the specialized football blogs that are achieving great success, sites like Zonal Marking. But despite their success, these sites are still atomized entities, there to be discovered on the WWW through the laborious process of blog links, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. The onus is currently on the reader for filtering out the crap, and discovering which sites are relevant and which aren’t. Excellent blogs go undiscovered, then disappear altogether, while crap soccer sites manipulate SEO for “Wayne Rooney Whore” headlines. There also isn’t any quality control. A popular site on French Football can go silent overnight, simply because the writer has other pressing priorities or has picked up freelance work. Sites might be forced to start publishing shorter and more search-engine attractive articles to keep their numbers up for pay-per-click ads.

What all of this means in simple terms is that blogs, particularly football blogs, have something to offer increasingly resource-strapped sports editors (more coverage, more angles, attracting more and more global readers through shared association), and they, in turn have something to offer bloggers—a wider audience, and, hopefully, by way of a number of different possible financial partnership models I’ll be looking at tomorrow, a reason to slog through when it’s not fun anymore (thank god Barry Glendenning didn’t go into blogging).

So, in summary: because sports news is now stratified across several up-to-the-minute media sources, individual newspapers are most important when it comes to primary source reporting on behind the scenes issues, trusted analysis on particular areas of the sport (Jonathan Wilson, Sid Lowe, Rafa Honigstein yada yada yada), and in providing a filter for readers to get the news they want quickly. Independent football blogs meanwhile offer sports desk an advantage in scope of coverage and association with a particular kind of sports writing (something we saw in a limited form with the Guardian’s Fans Network during the last World Cup). It’s possible there is absolutely no value to advertisers, bloggers, and newspapers in seeking this kind of partnership, but I think there is good reason for not dismissing it yet. That’s for tomorrow.

Image Credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/

When I was a precocious thirteen year-old, my favourite part of the morning was grabbing my dad’s Toronto Star on the front stoop, taking it inside and laying it flat out on my kitchen table, and opening it up on the editorial page. There, I would find the Letters to the Editor, featuring rebuttals, corrections, and general complaints about recent articles posted by staff journalists and columnists. I always found the letters more interesting than the carefully prepared screeds they were attacking, and was fascinated that the newspaper would devote an entire page to reader dissent. I even sent a few letters in myself, and some were printed, much to my astonishment.

For the longest time, this is how I followed the news. Not by reading the A1 articles, but rather the opinions of the unwashed who read and reacted to them. I don’t want to call Letters to the Editor page “proto-blogging,” but I think the model is relevant to how contemporary blogging worked for a long time. Once the internet came along, many of the same souls who wrote angry missives on misguided op-eds started to write full-length blog posts with links provided to the offending articles, and early blogging took its cues from this antagonistic relationship. Bloggers were always going on about the corporate-owned Mainstream Media, pointing out the inherent biases in newspaper coverage, ripping X, Y, and Z columnists whilst at the same time trying to prove as they were equal or better. Digital media proponents like Clay Shirky built their careers on the notion that “New Media” and traditional newspapers were in fundamental conflict with only one eventual winner, the “citizen journalist”, because the only thing separating the letter-writer and the print journalist was the printing press which the internet made accessible to everyone.

This antagonism was rampant in sports blogging as well, and football was no exception. You still see elements of it today: the raging diatribes against London bias against northern clubs, or against North American newspapers for not featuring more soccer coverage; the relentless criticism of the dour state of televised football punditry; Henry Winter and his gang of unruly critics. For many football bloggers, old media is and forever will be the enemy.

Yet over a decade of independent blogging later, many of us have taken a deep collective breath and realized a few things. First, that newspapers—in both print and on-line form—still have the resources required to provide up-to-the-minute news, and as such are still the number one source for most bloggers when it comes to sourcing story information (as we’ve seen during the current Wayne Rooney/United saga). Second, that bloggers provide something that newspapers and magazines can’t—geographic reach, intricate tactical breakdowns of several different league matches at once, regional football history, and in North America, comprehensive and frequently-updated coverage of the goings on of various MLS, NASL clubs.  The two might not overlap, or be locked in a death struggle, but might even be able to compliment each other somehow.

It’s certainly possible that blogs are blogs and print pubs are print pubs, and while they might do each other some good, the relationship won’t or shouldn’t go past links and page-views. But my own view is that blogs and print media might be vital for co-survival, and even could thrive together on-line. And I think football journalism, for reasons I’ll be getting into tomorrow, will lead the way in giving us a sense of what an on-line partnership between established journos and independent bloggers might look like.

I know that I and others have covered this topic in the past, and that it is familiar ground to many of you. Nonetheless, I think there are several reasons why now’s the time to take a long look at the future of football blogging. First, I think the phenomenon of burnt out bloggers in football is becoming more of a problem. A recent Fake Sigi post declaring pitchinvasion.net “dead”, and subsequent reaction on Jason Davis’ Match Fit USA raise some interesting questions about the financial pitfalls of independent football writing (something I’ll be looking at in more detail later). There is a sense that the centre will no longer hold in its current form for many un- or low-paid soccer writers.

Second, some of older pay models for on-line writers have definitely failed or are likely to become irrelevant. I think we now know the Rupert Murdoch pay-wall at the Times of London has failed. It fundamentally undercuts the power of the web, which is interconnectivity, open comments from readers, interaction (and other $5 buzzwords!). Equally outdated is the Huffington Post “shlock writing plus a zillion intrusive banner-ads” method (although exactly why this model is dead will be discussed in more details in a future post). I think on-line advertising will have to fundamentally change in form, and I think football journalism/blogging can provide a good model for what that might look like.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll be taking a look at why football (and not, say, water polo) journalism is a prime candidate for traditional media/blogging partnerships, and then we’ll take it from there.

Richard Whittall also writes A More Splendid Life.

It began last week, when Southampton’s Club Spokesman Jordan Sibley sent emails out in response to accreditation requests by photographers that read “Just so you are aware, this year, Southampton Football Club will be syndicating images from all home fixtures via a local agency.” An odd thing to say, as Southampton’s accreditation request form makes no mention of this, and a decision that would ban all other national, local and agency photographers from St. Mary’s.

The motivation for this appears to be part commercial (photos from a single handpicked agency could be guided to ensure they feature sponsors’ names more prominently, for example), and part petulance, as Roy Greenslade explains:

Local newspapers often bear the brunt of these kinds of ban when chairmen/managers/players take umbrage at critical coverage, whether it stems from the team’s performances, the coach’s talents or the state of the ground.

Sometimes, the two reasons are linked. Though Southampton’s ban appears to have a commercial motive, note what the club’s owner, Nicola Cortese, said a couple of months ago:

“Our fans and staff should be reassured that I will only make decisions affecting our future based on sound football and business thinking, and not on the whims of a local newspaper keen to maximise readership or pundits whose agendas are unclear.

“Furthermore, I will not respond to every piece of idle speculation. We have too much development work to do to waste time on such pursuits, and my time is dedicated to that work.

“As a local paper, I would have hoped that it would provide the local community with news, rather than gossip. However, I am not so naïve as to expect such speculation to stop.”

That barb was clearly aimed at the Daily Echo, which has probably been doing nothing more controversial than doing its job. From my earliest days in local journalism – when I reported regularly on three clubs – I discovered that no chairman or manager is ever happy with any coverage that isn’t slavishly supportive.

Southampton aren’t the first club to try something like this, with Newcastle banning reporters last season and Leeds’ in-house picture agency boycotted by the national press, who only printed photos of the club away from home.

But the good news is, Southampton’s decision has blown up in their face: the local agency in question, Digital South, have refused to participate in this attempt to suppress the freedom of their own profession. Despite a loss of potential income, Digital South’s boss Robin Jones took the principled stand, as he explained to the Sports Journalists’ Association:

“I disagreed with their stance on a total ban of photographers from any media source,” Jones told sportsjournalists.co.uk.

“I voiced this opinion to the club and genuinely thought that the ban would not take place. It became clear to me on Thursday that this ban was indeed happening and so I rang the club to inform them of my decision to decline their offer.

“Basically, a ban on photographers is simply a bad idea,” said Jones, whose agency employs two photographers, including his son, Michael Jones, also an SJA member.

“We felt that we were between a rock and a hard place, because we are sure that another agency or photographer might come forward to do this work for Southampton. But it is not something we are prepared to do.”

Jones’ stance comes after a show of solidarity by the press against Southampton’s decision: the Society of Editors, the Sports Journalists’ Association and the Telegraph Media Group all supported a media black-out of all pictures supplied by Southampton if they restricted coverage to a single hand-picked agency. Southampton have put themselves in a tricky situation, as they will know have to either back down or find an agency willing to go against their peers, and that would likely be one with low quality standards to begin with.

Many have been surprised Cook has kept his job despite several public gaffes, and indeed, many were surprised when he kept his job to begin with following the takeover of Manchester City by the Abu Dhabi group in 2008: Cook had been headhunted for his role by the previous owner, Thaksin Shinawatra (who he later regretted praising), and it seemed unlikely he would remain long in his role under new ownership, perceived by many to be an embarrassment and a poor man’s Peter Kenyon.

But Cook is still around. It’s clear that, for all his missteps and disregard for the traditions of English football, his global vision for branding City worldwide matches that of the club’s new owners, and City are implementing a smarter marketing strategy than just the age-old push to sell more gear in Asia.

Cook’s previous role was heading up Nike’s “Brand Jordan”, and when he was hired by Man City the word was — true or not — that Jordan himself had asked Cook not to leave the company. His amazing stream of gaffes aside, and armed with a massive war chest, Cook has turned around the marketing of City very much in the manner of a Nike campaign: like it or not (I know some City fans will be puking in their mouths), “Brand City” is now a credible global proposition.

To begin with, City have transformed their online presence. They were quick to jump right on the social media bandwagon: their Facebook page has an impressive 120,771 fans, and is high on “interactivity” with its users, a leg-up on  big clubs in the Premier League: Tottenham Hotspur’s Facebook page, for example, has no recent updates, while Aston Villa only have 16,146 fans — though they’re still a long way behind Manchester United in global awareness, of course, as over a million fans follow United’s page, launched just two weeks ago.

City’s relaunched website, as we’ve commented before, was built at considerable expense and is the best in Britain. Importantly, their strategy is to use online media to engage fans in the club: for example, their “My First City Game” campaign, with its own dedicated website at www.myfirstcitygame.com

This is slick marketing: decades of City history neatly branded with Etihad Airways sponsorship.

Overseas, their aim is to spread their brand by trying to show they do more than sell replica shirts and play the odd friendly, as the strategy surrounding their current US tour shows. The Sports Business Journal this week reported on City’s investment in American youth development, an endeavour that received plenty of press on both sides of the Atlantic to give credibility to the idea the club has a greater purpose to its overseas efforts than raking in fistfuls of dollars:

“There’s a long history of foreign teams expressing interest in the U.S., but candidly, there’s been little to show for it,” said Jeff L’Hote, founder of LFC International, a soccer consultancy. “To gain fans, you have to leave something behind between tour appearances. Chelsea’s been able to do that by linking to youth clubs, and for Man City something similar has to happen.”

The club hopes to overcome that by doing more than playing friendlies. In addition to paying to construct the soccer field at Lexington Academy in Harlem, it signed a three-year partnership with New York’s Downtown United Soccer Club that will see Man City assist with camps for inner-city youth.

“Coming here and playing exhibition games and walking away is not a sustainable model,” Cook said. “People see through that. You have to connect locally and you have to connect locally through youth development and the community.”

City’s online presence matches in this attempt to make their global brand locally-relevant: they have launched a specific version of their website just for US users, www.mcfc.com, hiring a content writer to tailor content for a US-audience. According to the Sports Business Journal, the site already receives over 10,000 daily visitors from the US.

In terms of setting up Man City as a global brand with resonance, like it or not, Garry Cook might just not be a fool after all.