History

Squarefootball was founded in June 2001 by Antony Melvin as an alternative source of football articles compared to the one-eyed fanzine sites and the sanitized national media.

Over the years the advent of blogs and the expansion of national newspapers and TV stations online has both squeezed and expanded the audience for football articles, leading to the collapse and birth of more brittle football sites than can properly be counted.

It is now possible that there are no longer any independent, general interest (as opposed to single club sites) football websites that are older than Squarefootball. Most of the old guard are now part of big media groups or have been squeezed out of existence.

Thousands of blog sites have sprung up and then fallen away in the past few years; but Squarefootball has stuck it out and now has an archive of over 6000 articles. Following a hack in early 2008 the decision was made to completely rewrite everything. The site usage peaked at 1.4m page impressions in June 2006, and averaged around a million page impressions per month since. Following the hack, the wholesale change in URLs and site structure has reduced this number significantly. *sobs*

The visitor statistics are moving up again now, but it has been a painful period.

Writers

Almost 200 writers have graced this site since 2001, the current team is in the page footer.

Technology

The site is built on Microsoft's .Net 2.0 framework and utilizes mashups and libraries like Netlicious and Jonathan Schemoul's Smooth Gallery. Some CSS techniques were 'borrowed' from elsewhere, including: equal height columns, rounded box corners, and Twitter.

The developers on the site rewrite have been Antony Melvin and Bob Coull.

Antony Melvin, December 2008