Redslo’s First Anniversary

This is my blog’s  one year anniversary.  The past year has been an interesting one for Southampton FC.  A year ago, many fans of the club and football experts throughout England were convinced that the club was in total meltdown and relegation was virtually inevitable.  A smaller group of people, including myself, saw no reason to panic.  Later today Southampton is playing in European Football for the first time in many years.  I do not believe I am overstating our case by saying we were right. 

I am happy with the first year of my blog and, with just a few exceptions, the relatively warm acceptance I have received from the Southampton FC community.  Like everyone else, I am looking forward to today’s game and the rest of the season.

Since I posted statistical information about my blog every ten thousand page hits, I am not going to go into any detail on that subject in this post other than to note that in the first year I received 33,544 page hits of which  7,047 occurred in the first week. 

I am still trying to figure out what I should write about.  Obviously, I am only going to write about subjects that interest me at least a little bit, but I do want to write things people want to read.  With that in mind, the response to my three most recent posts is both informative and mildly discouraging.

 

When Les Reed gave his recent interview about transfer dealings I decided to transcribe the interview and post it on my blog.  I have done this before with Southampton related interviews and the transcripts tended to get an above average number of page views.  While there is a significant amount of work in producing a transcription, the process is not a particularly intellectual endeavor or one that requires any specialized expertise.  Nevertheless, the Les Reed interview post was wildly popular producing over 900 page hits in one day—the second most ever.  I believe there were approximately 1200 separate views of the transcript. 

Shortly thereafter, I did an update to my earlier posts about Southampton European roster issues.  (By the way, I have been told that the proper term is “squad” not “roster”.  To an American, the term “squad” refers to the players whereas the term “roster” refers to the list of players.  I suppose I could call it a squad list but I am not sure that helps.  In this one area, I have knowingly decided not to adapt the English usage)  This post required some expertise in that I had to study the European Competition roster rules and research the various players to determine their proper status.  However, the update itself did not require that much additional work because I had already posted on this subject twice.  Nevertheless, by the standards of my blog, the post was fairly popular.  I estimate that somewhere between 200 and 250 people looked at it.

A couple of days later, I posted an update on the new Financial Fair Play rules.  I had been working on this post for over two weeks since UEFA issued its new Financial Fair Play rules.  I had to undertake a fairly detailed analysis of the rules to try to figure out what had changed.  This required reading more of the UEFA regulations then I had any real desire to read.  I also had to search the web to see what other people had said on the subject to ensure that I was not overlooking anything important.  In the end, I produced a summary of the rules and their potential effects which (as far as my Googling had determined) contained information that had not been published anywhere else on the internet in English (other than in the regulations themselves, of course).  Given the vast amount of attention that has been devoted to the Financial Fair Play rules and their consequences, even by Southampton fans, I thought that this post would be of interest to many people.  However, I am not sure even 100 people looked at it.

To put it another way, there does not appear to be any direct correlation between the amount of work I put into an article and my readers’ interest in that article.

Obviously, readers are free to read what they want to read and I am free to attempt to accommodate those interests as much or as little as I want.  Nevertheless, as I have stated, the relative lack of interest in my Financial Fair Play post was discouraging.

I have decided to expand the scope of my blog to include things that are not 100% (or even 1%) Southampton FC related.  I will occasionally post about other subjects that interest me.  Some of these “off topic” posts will be as much for my convenience as anything else because putting things on the blog gives me a place where I can find things easily in the future.  I am optimistic that some of these posts will be of interest to some of my readers (or that I will find new readers who are interested) but we shall see.   I am not sure what these new posts will be about except that I intend to post a monthly list of books I have read.  I will probably include short discussions of some of those books.

When I do post about something that is not Southampton FC related, I will not advertise my post on the various Southampton FC fan forums so people eager to read about Southampton FC and Southampton FC only will not be tricked into reading my opinions on American politics, Movies, or my reading list. 

In any case, I look forward to another year blogging about Southampton FC and another great season for the club.  I will go on the record right now as predicting that the upcoming season will be objectively better than the last season.  By this I mean that we will either finish with more points in the Premier League, a higher place in the Premier League, in the top half of the Premier League while progressing through to the knock out phase of the Europa League, or we will win a trophy while avoiding relegation.  This also means that I predict we will not be relegated.

 

Thank you to everyone who should be thanked for the past year--especially Southampton FC itself.  I never expected that I would grow to love another sports club at my age.