A note

I don’t think there’ll be another Get Goalside! newsletter for a while.

The latest, reviewing my opinion of a potential Harry Maguire transfer in the summer, opened with this line:

Opinions are thrown out like bread to ducks: relatively cheaply, for only shallow and temporary benefit to yourself and forgotten small doses of harm to the ducks.

And closed with this:

That’s a 1/3 record for the centre-back opinions I can remember thinking most deeply about, although the two misses weren’t big ones. I have no idea if that’s a good record. But I am all out of bread, and don’t much like ducks anyway.

and I think that says all it needs to.

I started the newsletter some seven(?) months ago as a vague outlet for football thoughts that didn’t fit elsewhere. It was convenient timing, because shortly after there was some uncertainty about my job situation, and I tried to plow attention towards the newsletter with some sort of notion that, if I needed it, maybe I could turn it into a healthy chunk of a freelance diet. The subscriber count never got close to that: at the time of writing, 711 free subscribers, with no paid tier, though with an open rate of 40-50% each week I doubt the conversion rate of that 711 to paid subs would have been super.

Part of that is because I’m very aware that the newsletter has been a bit scattergun in content. There’s been pick-and-mix weeks with multiple topics; detailed centre-back analysis; thoughts on potential transfers; musings on stats; some stats work; tactical blog posts… In some ways, I feel sorry for people who subscribed after one week, expecting future editions to be along the lines of that Tuesday’s post, only to get something completely different seven days later.

Thanks for reading, whether you’re a regular reader, a subscribe-and-sometimes-flick-through-er, or one of those who just clicks the links when I put them on Twitter. The newsletter may, one day, come back.

I’ll still be sporadically blogging at work for Twenty3 (sometimes for our blog there too).

But yeah. I’m all outta bread, and I’m sure the ducks never needed it anyway. The pond’s crowded enough as it is.