Avoiding the Drop

When we began this experiment in February we did so without anything more than a love of the game and the belief that we could translate that love into a site that, on any given day, would give its readers cause to think, to laugh, and perhaps to learn something new about this sport that has been such an important part of our, and we suspect your, lives.  In the course of doing so we have covered everything from the financial state of the game to the irrational hatred some people have for the sport, from the founding of a new professional league for women to our own exploits in pick-up games and local leagues.  There probably hasn’t been something for everyone, everyday, but we hope that there has been enough for each of you, often enough, that you regularly come back looking for more.

We would like to say a special “thank you” to those of you who choose to share something of yourselves and your love of the beautiful game with us through the comments section.  While preparing our articles and trying to remain informed and up-to-date on the football world we have occasion to visit many football sites:  large, small, professional, and amateur.  The tenor of the comments on too many of these sites can bring to mind the words that biographer James Parton once wrote regarding his impressions of Pittsburgh- that it was “like hell with the lid off.”  The disappointment we feel when reading these comments are, thankfully, more than balanced by your own, which have been insightful, humorous, passionate, and on more than one occasion, have inspired us to look at our chosen subject in ways which had not yet occurred to us.

You have also, to our great delight, been active participants in our endeavors.  Whether picking match winners with as little success as we do, racking your collective brains to answer our trivia challenges, or thinking up a suitably obscure or obscene name for your EPL fantasy team, we appreciate that you like what we’re doing enough to become more than just “visitors” to our site.  Several of you have also been kind enough to write articles at our request and we hope that we may have occasion to ask a few more of you to do the same in the coming months. Your numbers may be small, but your impact on the site has been large and the four of us will always come down on the side of quality rather than that of quantity.

Going forward we hope that you will be heartened to hear that we will be giving you “more of the same” in terms of content, style, and approach.  Behind the scenes both ideas and ambitions fly thick and fast, but they are always tempered by our belief that we should stick to doing well what we know well.  There will be changes and we will surely dip our toes into some new waters in the future, but rest assured that any and every change you might see in the site- no matter how large or small- will be, as it has been since the beginning, the product of spirited debate, constructive criticism, and the same kind of “shirt first” teamwork we all admire in our favorite clubs.

Finally, we our proud to say that not a single article that has appeared on this site since its inception in February has been published with the sole intent of generating page views.  In fact, we are often pleasantly surprised by how much interest is generated by pieces that we did not think would be of interest to any but the four of us.  You, our readers and commenters, are to be commended for your willingness to give our work a chance, no matter how parochial a form it may take.  It takes a lot of time and effort to make this site what it is and we can honestly say that you make it worth our while and keep us on our toes every day.

Yours in football,

thefuseproject
Adam
Magnakai Haaskivi
Two Yellows