Hanging on by a thread: The Technical Area, March 2024

Free to read: This month at SCOUTED, we need help.

Dear readers,

Welcome back to The Technical Area, one editor’s monthly blog about his team’s journey to create an independent football publication that, yaknow, doesn’t die.

This month: an explanation and an urgent appeal for help. Then, a glance at what’s next - and a couple of recommendations.

First, the explanation. We’ve been quiet these past few weeks. On staff we have two full-timers, one part-timer and three whenever-we-get-a-spare-second-between-our-real-job timers. These past couple weeks, one has been on leave, one got food poisoning (right after Dan James scored a last-minute goal from the halfway line…suspicious) one has been moving countries (again) and another has also been ill. Such is life for a wee business.

nailed it

The good news? Barely anyone has unsubscribed. Seriously, this has been such a lifesaver. Knowing we can go and deal with real life and come back to our audience is incredible. Media and journalism under the ad economy is all about movement, about spamming algorithms and chasing trends. That you’re all just here, waiting to read whatever we do next…it’s difficult to describe the relief. And it reaffirms my belief - not that I needed it - that this is the correct model for the future.

The bad news?

Troubled waters

Okay, so - we need your help.

Last month I outlined the revenue split between the core pillars of our business. This month, the largest of those pillars - our SEO-powered website built to generate ad revenue - took a huge hit. Ad rates are down across the industry and our traffic has tanked because Google pressed some buttons or something. The result is the source of more than 50% of our revenue has collapsed and doesn’t look like returning to full strength anytime soon. I don’t know what any of this means and I’m fucking scared.

Look, I do want to wean SCOUTED off its dependency on ads. In fact, last month I said this:

Well, I am a purist - ideally I’d want to shut scoutedftbl.com down and have the hundreds of thousands of people who use it come to Notebook instead, but that’s some way off yet. Let a man dream.

Google heard me, apparently. Fuck you guys, I didn’t mean right now! The honest truth is we don’t yet have the money to survive if our ad revenue runs dry. This is bad - but we always do our best work with our backs against the wall. So let’s find our silver lining.

The wall makes a fine springboard

Last year, in May, we launched Notebook alongside a crowdfunding campaign to bring us back to print. The campaign failed (we did raise over £13k tho - hashtag grateful) but Notebook has since become the centre of our business and the pillar of our future. In the intervening year we haven’t really made a concerted push for subscribers; we’ve just published what we think is good, found our voice and watched people slowly pay for the writing we do.

We’re sitting at 500 subscribers right now, which is amazing. It’s been a fight to get here. But what is absolutely mind-boggling is that those 500 people, every month, pay us half the revenue we make from hundreds of thousands of users on the website. This is absolutely, indomitably, undeniably, the future.

If just a few thousand people subscribed - for just 75% of the price of one pint in London - we’d be able to run a fully fledged publication, pay ourselves and our freelance writers and artists fairly, and not spend every waking moment terrified of our imminent collapse. Just a few thousand.

Are there a few thousand people on the internet willing to pay for beautiful writing and sharp analysis on the next generation of football players? Yes. Yes. Abso-fucking-lutely. A few thousand people bought each edition of The Handbook way back when. We just need to find them and convince them we’re worth paying for.

This will not happen overnight. It will take a long time, and a lot of great writing. But we can take a leap of faith in that direction today.

That leap is a subscription drive. I’m talking subscriber goals. I’m talking cool (but small) rewards for our biggest supporters. I’m talking new series, different newsletters and more great writing than ever before. We’ll make a big song and dance out of it as we always do, but as a reader of The Technical Area, this is your heads up. I’ll be spending the rest of this month planning and getting things ready. Then, in May, we’ll do our best to push our beloved magazine to its next level.

If you enjoy what we do, if you believe in the same future I do, we’re going to need you. Tell your friends. Recommend us. Share our work. We know you will - we love you for it.

Writer-owned, collectively run and reader-supported media is the future. So many writers from so many verticals are adopting this model and crushing it. Shout out Defector, shout out Aftermath, shout out Second Wind, shout out Mill Media. We can be football’s answer. All of us, all us readers who care about keeping football writing alive and well and free of corporate nonsense, together. It won’t happen overnight. But it is possible, and May will be the start.

Of course, we’re not a charity. This is a business and, like any business, we need to sell good stuff. I’ve been in my dungeon, cooking. We have big plans for the summer. But for now, I’ve been doubling down on curating world-class feature stories with some of my favourite writers - the kind of beautiful writing, deep analysis and striking narratives that are only possible when readers pay for them.

We’re kicking things off with a brand-new story from, in my biased opinion, one of the best new voices in football analysis: Billy Carpenter.

As a thanks for reading this far - and, if you’re a new reader, proof we’re worth the price of admission - here’s an excerpt. Enjoy.

Branco van den Boomen wasn’t overly romantic when asked why Toulouse FC decided to sign him from De Graafschap in the second tier of Dutch football.

“They entered the profile of the player they were looking for into the computer," the midfielder explained. “And my name came up on the list.”

If it weren’t for his age — he was 25 by the time he played in France — van den Boomen may be the perfect encapsulation of the rebirth of Toulouse. The skilled (if underestimated) midfielder was identified and swooped by a meticulous data organisation after producing for an overlooked lower-tier side. He was secured for an average night at the steakhouse for Todd Boehly (€350k), then unleashed upon unsuspecting competitors in France.

By his second season, van den Boomen was the Kevin de Bruyne of Ligue 2. This is not said without evidence. He collected 12 goals and 21 (!) assists, the latter being a league record. The club secured automatic promotion back into the top tier in 21-22.

For his next act, he helped Toulouse secure the 106th Coupe de France in a 5-1 shellacking of Nantes. He had an assist from one of his trademark nasty corners, and added nine passes into the final third and seven recoveries, all without being dispossessed a single time. Celebrations ensued.

Now with Ajax, the player in question is enduring a, uh, strange year. For the purposes of this story, that’s fine. We’re not here to talk about him.

We’re here to talk about the rise of the youngest team in Europe.

The full story is dropping next week, exclusively for Notebook subscribers. Get it fresh by signing up below.

Finally, a recommendation (or two, actually).

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog writing about the media industry and its state; a sailor, I think, should probably know the sea. And it motivates me to know journalism is in a weird period of flux because our work here could, actually, make a small but cascading difference. That would be pretty cool.

Anyway, I’ve been following the work of writer Ed Zitron for a while. His new podcast, Better Offline, is an exploration of the damage venture capitalism is doing to tech and its many sub-industries. Last week’s episode, delightfully named Rich Idiots Are Killing The Media To Please The Tech Industry, is an excellent summation of the issues I’ve been writing about thus far.

And he comes to a reassuring conclusion: if we wrest power out of the hands of venture capital and give it back to the writers, we will Make Media Great Again. The fastest route to this promised land? Supporting, paying and empowering writer-owned outlets who make great stuff.

If you think SCOUTED make great stuff, we’d love to be your writer-owned subscription of choice.

And if you love video games as much as you love football, I have another subscription to recommend. This month, the fine people at Aftermath began their first subscription drive (which, yes, I am copying). At last update they had reached 3200 subscribers, which is deeply encouraging. Congratulations and solidarity to them.

Their journalism is excellent, they’re writer-owned, and you should absolutely consider a subscription if you like that sort of thing. Here’s a story I enjoyed if you’d like to check them out. You can read a few before you hit the paywall.

I’m building a folder on my bookmarks bar of writer-owned publications I subscribe to. All told, I spend less than the price of buying a newspaper every day - and my money goes directly into the pockets of writers, not the off-shore tax haven of a billionaire called Lord Harris Snobbleton. It feels great. I get so much great reading in every day on almost every topic I’m interested in.

I really hope you’ll consider adding us to your rotation. We’re building something cool. It gets tough sometimes, but we’re still here. We’re still going.

I’ll see you next month for our subscription drive. In the meantime, thank you so much for being here and for reading this. It means the world.

Warmly,

Tom