SURREAL FOOTBALL is a football blog with a difference, not only in content, but in attitude. Most people who write blogs about football do it for two reasons; firstly, for their love of the sport, and secondly, as a mode through which they could get recognised by someone important somewhere within the big, congested world of sports journalism and end up realising their dreams writing the back page story of The Guardian.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a second year English and Politics student who part owns thefcf.co.uk, the website with which surrealfootball.com has recently combined, and he lives under no false pretences. “The site started up because me and two other writers I knew thought we could make money from it” he told me, “we’d written for a few places already and fancied we knew how to get hits. I’d thought about being a sports journalist for a bit, but a week as an intern at Goal.com made me realise that I hate deadlines and being told what to do, and that I don’t like football. So the site seemed a logical way to go; a way of making money, but also licence to do what you wanted. What it was never meant to be was purely for fun. We’ve always done it as a business, and I think that you have to be like that if you’re actually going to make decent money from it. Enough money to avoid a proper job, that is.”
The merge with the FCF, therefore, makes a huge amount of sense. As Ethan says, “there were a few reasons for the move, but they all come back to looking more like a business than amateurs. Surreal Football had a reputation for being opinionated and that was going to hold it back slightly – in terms of hits and sponsorship. The FCF has, first of all, a name which is more flexible – it can be serious or jokey, for instance. But it’s also better known as a quality site – the owners of the original site all write for The Guardian and ESPN, and we’ve all done stuff for places like Sports Illustrated and Football 365 (yeah, get us!) – so it’s got maybe more potential than Surreal Football had. One of the three of us doing Surreal Football already part-owned The FCF, so that’s where the link between the two came from.”
Away from being driven by money rather than love, Surreal Football also makes an effort to be different from other football blogs, primarily, so as not to be “utter wank”. “We try for some funny stuff, because it’s easy to do and gets hits; some quality sports writing, because I don’t think many places do that, really, and it can be genuinely good; and some stuff with a conscience, because I think a lot of things are s**t in football (and everywhere else), and if you’ve built a decent platform you should try and use it to point out those things”, opines Ethan. “We spend a lot of time taking the piss out of the readership too – the main in-joke is that we’re harvesting them for hits.”
The websites display articles ranging from the very normal, such as previews of fixtures, to the absurd. On searching through the Surreal Football archives, I found that Dean-Richards has even conducted an interview with himself, which makes for quite bizarre reading.
What is without doubt is that when there’s an opinion to be expressed, Surreal Football don’t hold back. “We got a lot of criticism from bloggers for attacking The Guardian Sports Network because we felt it was going to be bad for writers”, Ethan says. “Basically, the Guardian came up with putting blogposts up on its website with a link back to the original site as the only payment. We called this out as the beginning of a race to the bottom, where writing is devalued and writing jobs are eventually lost – why pay for something you can have for free?”
More recently, the website attacked Luis Suarez, found guilty of racially abusing Patrice Evra, and his club, Liverpool FC, through their twitter feed. For instance, mocking Suarez every time a black player scored in the Premier League.”We thought it was wrong for a club to use the almost religious fervour surrounding it to defend racism for its own ends. That serious journalists who support Liverpool were arguing this case is a pretty nasty business. I’d rather point things like this out than pretend to be alright with them. It did mean that SF is unpopular though – The Guardian didn’t like us anymore and stopped linking, and a mention of us at an awards thing a couple of weeks ago was greeted with boos by bloggers,” he admits.
Speaking on his aims for the future, Ethan says, “the aim is to get the balance right between quality and getting hits (making money). We’ll get 300,000 page views this month, but next month, once we’ve got into a rhythm with the new site (and for various other reasons) I’d guess we’ll actually be closer to 500,000. But we want to do something interesting – not just stuff we could write for other places, probably for more money. Some of the best stuff we’ve had up would never have been taken if you were offering it to one of the very biggest places as a freelancer, and I like that we take stuff like that. I’d like to have the website as my only job, because my experience of freelancing is dreadful – rejection, being cheated out of money and being edited badly by clowns I don’t respect. It’s the opposite of an ambition: I want to have it fucking easy. Though I don’t want to write about football forever either, just until I can afford not to.”