31 August 2003
Sadly, individual clubs mostly have awful websites. Most of the Premiership sides have their sites built by a company called Premium TV , part of the cable company . These sites require login — and for most of the content, payment — they don’t look individual, they have horrible URLs…they suck, frankly. Credit to Southampton for having what is the best of a pretty miserable bunch.
Enter Dundela FC , a team in the Irish Football League, have not only a site that validates as XHTML 1.1, but also a blog*spot weblog. They don’t have banner ads, but update frequently despite presumably having less resources than Premiership sides.
A note for those who might not know otherwise: as indicated by the .co.uk domains, the Irish Football League is from Northern Ireland. The domestic league in the Republic is the League of Ireland, also known as the Eircom League.
Footblog: a footballer’s blog is rarely updated and (for obvious reasons) anonymous. It’s been fun reading so far, but the as far as I’m concerned the jury’s still out. Not only on whether it’s worth reading, but whether it’s legit. Although why someone would pretend to be an anonymous, sparsely-updating, weblogging professional footballer is beyond me.
As the man says, ‘It’s not a fancy one like those guys who use www.icons.com , but then my site won’t be full of ads trying to sell you dodgy merchandise.’
And he’s right. Icons is shockingly banal. You might not expect much else from such celebrated masters of the cliché and the inane, but it’s still a disappointment. Legendary waster Winston Bogarde has this to say for himself.
I wasn’t given a chance before the takeover, so it’s unlikely that things will change now that we have so many extra players.
[…]
Remember, we qualified for the Champions League before all this money became available, so they must not be forgotten.
— Source
Despite all this, football websites are, on the whole, pretty good. There’s the allegedly dry but good-looking Soccernet, which also has a couple of great columnists. There’s the tabloid-esque but funny Football 365. There’s the all-powerful Beeb. There’s the multi-multi-national SoccerAge. There’s the useful reference Soccerbot, and the other useful reference Soccerbase. There are the various UK newspaper sites. There’s Eleven-A-Side, for Irish footballing news. And that’s without mentioning a myriad of local papers, fan sites, and the like.