Stirring the Pot Seems to Have an Audience

Twenty thousand visits in four months will not trouble major media outlets.

The Athletic will not be knocking to acquire my media empire any time soon.

Still, for an independent football blog from Tasmania, often written in a fluffy dressing gown at the kitchen table before daylight, it tells me something.

People are reading.

More than that, they seem to be returning.

That matters to me because much of what I write is not designed to flatter anyone. It asks questions. It pushes at assumptions. Sometimes it irritates people. Occasionally people I know.

So yes, there are moments when I wonder whether it is worth doing.

Then I look at the graph.

January steady.

February steady.

March climbing.

April taking off.

And I think perhaps this says something larger than website traffic.

Perhaps honest writing finds its people.

When I started this blog I worried I might run out of things to say.

An odd concern in hindsight.

Football cured that anxiety quickly.

Football is the gift that keeps on giving.

Some mornings I sit in a fluffy dressing gown at the kitchen table wondering what to write.

Football usually answers before the tea goes cold.

And not just through matches, though this morning’s Paris Saint-Germain against FC Bayern Munich was some reminder of the game’s drama.

I do not even need to write match reports.

Football keeps handing over material.

Politics.

Characters.

Contradictions.

False dawns.

Petty empires.

Moments of grace.

Moments of farce.

Sometimes all in the same week.

Sometimes in one ordinary Saturday around a football ground.

That is why the well does not run dry.

The game keeps giving.

And perhaps readers sense that what I am writing about is often not just football.

It is power.

Belonging.

Memory.

Community.

How decisions get made.

Who gets heard.

Who doesn’t.

There is an old warning that if you stir the pot too much, people stop listening.

I am beginning to suspect the opposite can sometimes be true.

Maybe people are tired of polite silences.

Tired of managed messaging.

Tired of safe language pretending difficult questions do not exist.

Maybe they want someone to say aloud what many mutter on sidelines and over coffees.

Not because they want conflict.

Because they want candour.

There is a difference.

Some of the posts that have resonated most have surprised me.

Often they were not the most careful.

They were the most honest.

That has taught me something.

Readers are not only drawn to certainty.

Sometimes they are drawn to recognition.

To seeing something named.

And I rather like the irony that while grassroots football is so often reduced to metrics, participation numbers, registration numbers, convenient statistics, perhaps people are reading precisely because they want the stories behind the metrics.

Not numbers.

Members.

Not data.

People.

That thought stays with me.

Because for years many of us in grassroots football have been trundled out as participation numbers when convenient.

Useful as evidence.

Less useful as voices.

Maybe some of this readership is people pushing back against that in their own quiet way.

Maybe they are simply drawn to writing that starts with lived experience rather than institutional language.

Either way, it encourages me.

This blog began almost as a notebook made public.

A place to remember.

A place to make sense of things.

A place to stir the pot now and then.

Somewhere along the way it seems to have become a conversation.

I like that.

If twenty thousand visits tells me anything, perhaps it is this.

Keep writing what you feel.

Keep asking awkward questions.

Keep naming patterns.

Keep stirring.

The pot, it seems, may have an audience.

And no, The Athletic probably is not buying the publication.

But perhaps the little media empire has found a few readers.

That will do nicely.