Coverage

In 2006, I started to write for a site called Vital Arsenal on the Vital Football Network where I would write opinion pieces and overly gregarious match reports. Shortly before their Champions League Final against Umea in April 2007, I asked the editor, Paul, if I could write some articles about the Women’s team too. I was watching them regularly and could not see that anyone else was writing about them.

I started off just writing a monthly column about Arsenal Ladies. Trends, tactics, talking points etc. In February 2011, I joined Arseblog as a weekly columnist on the men’s team and, until 2015, I continued to write for Vital Arsenal too, albeit on a reduced basis. Initially, I didn’t take the idea of writing about the women’s team across to Arseblog.

In early 2012, Arsenal were about to kick off their WSL season with a game against Chelsea at Emirates Stadium. Around 5,000 supporters turned out at that game and, clearly, Arsenal were trying to raise awareness of the game and sell tickets. One of the press officers reached out to Andrew (the owner and editor of Arseblog) and asked whether we wanted a little player access to help them to promote ticket sales.

Andrew referred them to me and I interviewed long-serving Irish international Ciara Grant. I conducted the interview over the phone and hand wrote her answers. I printed it as a straight up Q&A rather than feature interview style, which I would never do for this type of interview now. In any case, those were the rather humble beginnings of my current correspondent role.

Every time Arsenal Ladies had a big game, the press officer would put out a circular email to a number of publications, Arseblog included, asking if anyone wanted some player access. I responded every single time. In the 2012 / 2013 period I interviewed Steph Houghton, Kim Little, Jordan Nobbs, Kelly Smith and Emma Byrne and before every significant game we were able to run an exclusive player interview and that was about as far as our coverage stretched at that point.

Soon enough, Arsenal stopped sending circular emails and just started emailing me directly every time they wanted to offer some player access ahead of a big match. Soon enough, I became brave enough to start emailing them to request access off my own back. At that point, I think I moved my monthly Arsenal Women column from Vital Arsenal to Arseblog and that was how things carried on for a few years.

I would get a player interview roughly every six weeks and in between, I would write an opinion column. In the spring of 2018, Arseblog moved to a part Patreon model which enabled us to change the way we did things. One of the first things Andrew wanted to do with the Patreon income was expand the coverage of the women’s team. So we scaled up, match previews, press accreditation at games etc, etc, etc. In February 2019 we launched the podcast and have scaled up ever since.

During covid, Arsenal started to run pre-match press conferences with the manager (now it seems strange that they only started happening this recently but, with access restricted through covid, pre-match press conferences with the manager were the club’s way of bridging the access gap) so we covered those too.

For us, the access to the coach is paramount to the coverage and why we always, always attend the pre and post-match press conferences and always, always ask our allotted questions. We decided early on that the prime driver for the coverage had to be Arsenal fans and that, as far as we possibly could, we would try to act as a conduit between the club and the supporters and try to get answers to the questions they want answered.

As time has moved on, wider publications have begun to appoint women’s football correspondents and the overall coverage has improved immeasurably, which has enabled us really narrow in on our coverage. We know that Goal, the Guardian, the BBC, Sky Sports, the Telegraph, the Times etc will be at press conferences and we know they will ask questions for the wider audience; so we no longer have to worry about trying to be all things to all people.

That really enables us to tailor coverage for committed Arsenal fans, we are able to pitch at ‘subject matter experts.’ In reality, we operate a lot like local press and local journalists used to (albeit with a global audience of Arsenal fans) in our team coverage- John Cross, for example, was the Arsenal correspondent for the Highbury and Islington Express before moving across to the Daily Mirror.

In the modern media landscape, a lot of these local titles and roles are being decimated, which is an enormous shame because they serve(d) such a great purpose for fans. In pure journalism terms, the role has taught me a lot- not least the value of persistence. Turn up. Turn up to all the games, turn up to all the press conferences, keep writing, keep recording. Over time, that is how you create networks, create trust with the audience and the players, create a professional relationship with the club and the confluence of your presence slowly starts to add up to something bigger.

We still have ambitions to develop the coverage, I would really like to get the podcast onto a more regular, predictable schedule. I think what Flo Lloyd-Hughes, Jessy Parker Humphreys and Becky Taylor Gill have built with the Counterpressed podcast is really inspiring and I would like our podcast to become a bit more fan-centric and to talk with the audience rather than to the audience.

That’s all for 2024. Until then I would like to wish all of our readers a happy and peaceful festive season, whether or not you celebrate Christmas and we can’t wait for everything to start up again on January 14^th!