Five places soccer fans go online

Sourced from http://www.ryanjknapp.com/blog/five-places-soccer-fans-go-online/

The title of this article says it all and I found it summed up my thoughts and observations. Hope you find this informative. Can't stop, involved in an interesrting discussion online with a few people about our A league - a couple of these people should be on the FFA Board or A League Club Boards!

Five places soccer fans go online
by Ryan Knapp on November 10, 2010

storytime: Two years ago I was (briefly) a part of a project for a website called Football Fans United, which was billed as a ‘place to unite all football (soccer) fans in the world under one roof.’ I was completely on board with this project in my naievity and soon after the project took off, the project failed. I was blown away by how a well designed website with a clear vision of soccer world domination went down so quickly.

What I´ve learned is trying to corral the world’s soccer fans into one specific website is like herding 30 kids in a U-6 soccer team. Good luck.

So, the oft asked question is ‘Where do soccer fans hang out online?’ I’ll give you my Top 5 places where they interact (and where I go) and let you fill in your favorites.

1) Message Boards - The old standby, message boards are still an absolutely huge source of interaction for soccer fans across the world. In the United States in particular, BigSoccer is by far the biggest (while many argue the quality of people on there.) It’s where Peter Wilt made his name as being one of the first CEO’s to ‘do social media’ when the term didn’t even exist. In Europe, message boards are all too commonplace, with each team having a myriad of fan driven message boards. BigSoccer.com is seen as one of the biggest active soccer message boards in the world.

2) Blogs (and not your official one) - In 2007 I started this career in soccer by writing a blog called Center Holds It along with Jeff Bull and Breton Bonnette. There wern’t many of us at the time, but there are absolutely loads of soccer bloggers now. Inherent in the American soccer landcape is the blog mentality. For years, mainstream journalism did not care less for the sport, so we as fans simply took their place. While leagues and teams are catching on, some of the most popluar blogs such as The Offside, still reign in over 1.5 million page views a month. Teams are starting to come around and use blogs for their own websites, but for me independent blogs still maintain a feel that has yet to be matched by official team blogs.

3) Facebook - I’m truly amazed at the openness of soccer players to connect with their fans on Facebook. The diference is many American soccer fans interact with you via their personal Facebook page and not a larger fan page. The soccer community is extremely small, but 90% of professonal MLS players have no qualms about friending you on Facebook and make it a point to connect as if you were a long lost friend.
While this may seem like a great opportunity for fans to break down the walls and players to grown their own personal fan base, teams no longer have the control over producing content about a specific player, but rather the fans simply can go, interact and ask the player themselves. While this is a large part in MLS, I can say this doesn’t happen in every country, where players fan pages number into the millions.

4) Twitter - Where would the soccer community be without Twitter in 2010. Soccer fans/bloggers/staff have jumped on the twitter bandwagon at an alarming rate. As mentioned with the blogs, this is due to the overwhemling nature of most soccer fans searching out more fans to talk shop. Twitter has exploded with fans of the beautiful game, talking about USMNT, USWNT, MLS and loads more. With the adoption of twitter as a mainstream form of communication, the soccer community will grow and flourish even more as new fans convert to the game and old fans connect across the United States.

5) Illegal streams (untapped) - let’s face it, the soccer world is full of fans watching games in unknown languages where you hope you don’t get a virus. This is a completely untapped market in my opinion. However, the shear fact the thousands of illegal streams out there are..well..illegal, means the opportunity to truly monatize and utilize those streams to connect with fans is extremely difficult. During the World Cup, fans flocked to these streams and were interacting with one another, even if the language barrier was evident.

What you do not see on here are stand alone soccer platforms. I’ve seen stand alone platforms come and go. I receive at least one or two invitations to try out different platforms and websites with the goal of uniting the entire world under one website which has poor functionality and no real uniting factor.