Taking a look at existing football social network websites
01Nov09
A couple of months ago, when I was writing a motivation for my thesis subject, I already searched for which social network websites for football are out there. As a football fan, and an active internet user, I wasn’t aware of any established ones (like Facebook and LinkedIn are for other subjects). Now, I took a look at all the football SNS which look like they have a reasonable user base.
What functionality does a website have to offer in order to qualify as a social network site? In “The Future of Social Networks on the Internet” [1] the authors sum it up as:
SNSs usually offer the same basic functionality: network of friends listings (showing a person’s “inner circle”), person surfing, private messaging, discussion forums or communities, events management, blogging, commenting (sometimes as endorsements on people’s profiles), and media uploading.
There are a lot of traditional news websites and discussion forums about football on the Web. In Belgium (and probably everywhere) every club has an official website and most of them have an online community with discussion forums. There are several unofficial discussion forums, fan websites, fan club websites, news websites,… I am focussing on Web 2.0 SNSs in this overview. Among other things I will look at the functionality of these websites and how they present this functionality. I will evaluate them from a personal perspective. Later on, I will either interview or survey other football fans to determine the requirements for my thesis project.
Footytube
Footytube is one of the best football SNS I came across. It has a fresh and modern look. The main function of the site seems to be that it aggregates football videos. The site also offers the ability for users to create a profile, it has discussion forums, a blog and also a fantasy football game. Fantasy football games allow users to select their own team out of all the players in a certain division (or sometimes even all the players in Europe). Points are awarded based on the performances of those players. It is also possible to upload photo’s, links, news,….
Footytube doesn’t only allow users to add friends, but also add rivals. This is something that fits in the football domain as fans of rivaling clubs might consider themselves rivals as well. A users profile also contains something called “fan traits” which is an overview of how other users rate your behavior on the website. There is also a user ranking on which users that contribute more to the community are ranked higher. They can even use a bonus based on their ranking in the fantasy football game.
I think the website is fairly easy to use, I do believe the structure could be better. The profiles stand too much on their own. There is no way to learn about what your friends are up to except for going to their profile (no news feed or anything similar). I’m unsure if it is a good idea to support “rival relationships”. Could this stimulate negative behavior?
I think footytube tries to do a lot of things (video’s, social networking, discussion forums, football statistics, fantasy football) without real focus. I believe that many successful web applications have one core feature, one unique selling point, which makes it successful. Focussing on being strong at one aspect is better than trying to do a lot of things at the same time without excelling at any of it.
I really like how footytube offers an API so that other websites have free access to football data like fixtures, results,…. It looks like footytube has been online for some time already as the copyright indicates 2006-2009 and the site version is 2.0.
3nil
3nil is a social media website about football. As far as I know it is the only one of its kind about football but there are sites like Reddit, Digg and Newsvine that are more general.
I really like the concept of social media. Social media websites use the collective voting behavior of a community to filter out the stories that are the “best” or the “most relevant” to the community. It works very well for Digg, which has enjoyed constant growth over the past years. By the looks of it, 3nil does not have a big active user base. The highest number of votes on a story on the front page is 12. The stories on the front page are all recent though which indicates the site is still in use.
This is pretty much all there is to 3nil. It is purely based around submitting and voting on stories. It is possible to add friends but the social network aspect of 3nil is very limited. I think the design/structure of the web site could be better. The site emphasizes a lot on pictures and embedded video’s and the story titles get a bit lost in between.
I think social media websites are an interesting development on the web but 3nil doesn’t seem very successful. I think this is at least in part because it doesn’t offer any form of personalization. It pretty much assumes that all football fans have similar interests. The front page represents some of the bigger football stories worldwide. The website does offer the functionality to search for all the stories with a certain tag but this isn’t a very easy way to get the stories that interest you. It would be a lot better if the story ranking would take into account preferences (which clubs you support, …).
Goalpostr
First of all, it looks like goalpostr is on its way down. The latest entry was made two weeks ago. The purpose of the website seems to be simular to that of twitter, but then about football. It categorizes messages by club. You can write messages (“updates”) on the site or use twitter with the #goalpostr tag.
Extrafootie
Extrafootie is made by a company based in Belgium. They have 3 websites: one for Flanders (extravoetbal.be), one for Wallonia (extrafoot.be) and one for the UK (extrafootie.co.uk). Like the previous website I reviewed these 3 websites (which are essentially the same except for the language), do not have a lot of active users. There are even some users who are discussing their belief that the site will close in the near future because of inactivity of the administrators.
To me, extrafootie is similar to footytube in the sense that they both offer a lot of functionality. Extrafootie has news, forums, game predictions, social networking, a wiki on football, statistics,… Users have a profile, they can add friends, send messages, all the basic social network actions. There is also a feed containing recent activity regarding your favorite club.
I have the same conclusion as with footytube. The site offers several decent features but it lacks one great core feature (focus!). The flemish site has 4551 users which doesn’t indicate it has become a genuine success.
Yourleague
This site focusses on amateur football. It is possible to view some information on the Belgian clubs, create a profile and add friends. It doesn’t seem like the users submitted much content so far. Most of the club pages I visited only had a small amount of content. Most of the categories (such as “Agenda”, “Competitie”, “Clubprikbord”, “Zoekertjes”) for several of the club pages I visited have no entries at all. This includes some of the featured clubs on the home page (“clubs in de kijker”). An example of one of the (as far as I can see many) “empty” club profiles:
I do like the idea of supporting offline behavior online. This website could be used by players of amateur clubs. It doesn’t seem like a lot of content has been submitted so far. For the last week the front page hasn’t changed as far as I can see either. The featured video is still the same. I believe the featured clubs are too. This is exactly what I mean by that there isn’t enough content for me to visit this website. Even though the website targets amateur football players there is a profile page for KRC Genk, my favourite team. Next to the statistics (fixtures/results and league table) there is no content on this clubs profile page. For such information, users can go to sporza.be or footbel.be instead.
Footbo
Footbo is one of the more successful existing football SNS. It offers a wide range of features including detailed profiles, news, blogging, video’s, photo’s, top 11’s (your favourite line-ups), predictions, forums, live scores, stats,… .
In May it was said (in a press release) that footbo had over 250000 users. They also implemented Facebook connect. Footbo tries to be a “one-stop shop” for football fans. Just like extrafootie and footytube they offer a lot of functionality but just like those it doesn’t seem like they found the best recipe for a football SNS. I find Footbo quite unstructured and I believe they too try to do too much.
Ole ole
Ole ole aggregates a lot of information on football. They show a feed of the latest football news and blog posts. Next to this they offer features like scores, fantasy football, social network functionality, statistics, photo’s, video’s,… The site does not seem to be focussed around the social networking aspect. It has over 400000 users.
Again, I believe this site lacks focus. It is all also very loosely coupled which doesn’t make it easy to use. Look for example at the profile page which has so many boxes. It’d be much better to find a way to integrate these different things into a feed.
Conclusion
My reviews got shorter and shorter the more sites I had reviewed. The reason for this is because I kept getting the same feeling. There is a lack of focus on most of the sites. They try to integrate a lot of features that might be of use to the football fan. They however don’t succeed in integrating these in a way that makes using them more appealing than using several sites that focus on one aspect (news sites, photo sites like flickr, video sites like youtube, general social network sites like facebook). If you want to be an aggregator of information you have to offer added value (for example: filtering on quality). If you build to be a social network site you need to offer a good structure which actually integrates different features (like Facebook does with showing a lot of different things in the feed).
I think it is necessary to look at what football fans already do on the web, look at their existing “processes” for satisfying their football needs. Start from the problem space, not the solution space. I think this could be an explanation for the approach of a lot of the sites I reviewed. In my opinion they bundle a number of features in a mediocre way. I think they might have started by saying “we need feature x, y and z in our site, and photo’s, and blogs, and …”. I think it is better to investigate existing behavior and then try to make something to significantly improve that experience (structure and design are key here). I realize I’ve been fairly negative about the existing SNS. I think it is great that are some football SNS out there I can learn some things from – positive and negative. I however think that there aren’t any great football SNS out there (yet!).
[1] J. Breslin, S. Decker. The Future of Social Networks on the Internet. IEEE Internet Computing (November – December 2007)
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