The final Technical Area
This month at SCOUTED, we take a swing.
Dear friends,
The time is nigh; next week, SCOUTED is leaving Substack.
I’m quite scared.
Scared, because this is a risk, and we’ve worked really, really hard to build this little audience here, and because the fragile connection between your credit cards and Stripe is the only thing keeping us alive and I’m about to meddle, and because I feel responsible, both to my colleagues and the many people who have come to love SCOUTED and what it means over the past decade.
But we gotta move forward, man.
If you’re new here, The Technical Area is our behind-the-scenes blog. I thought for the very final edition on this platform, I’d try to keep things a little more direct than usual. This edition is also going to be free - so if you don’t usually get to read these, have a gander.
I’ll be covering:
- The problem with SCOUTED
- How the future looks, for you
- The big dream
Let’s get into it.
The problem facing SCOUTED
Or: why we’re jumping ship
In May 2023, I went all-in on SCOUTED for what I promised myself would be the final time. I felt magazines, journalism, editorial, the entire shebang, was at a weird inflection point. The industry needed small, vibrant independent publications, I thought, to prove new financial models could lead to good outcomes.
Tbh, I was kinda right. As I’ve discussed in previous editions of TTA, the industry has pivoted hard, top to bottom, away from online advertising and towards subscriptions. This has changed things in many ways and allowed some smaller publications to thrive because the goalposts have moved. Quality, voice, creativity - these things matter again. At the end of the day, words on a page are just words on a page, whether they were bankrolled by a hedge fund or penned by a teenage football blogger in his bedroom.
And SCOUTED is much healthier now than it was at the beginning of all this. We make £0 from online advertising these days, so are essentially free to write whatever we want (as long as it’s good). We are among the best-selling football newsletters on Substack. Our email list has tripled in size since we arrived here and we have 600%+ more readers paying us a monthly fee than during our Patreon days.
And how about this for a fuckin’ stat:
Today, we have more people paying us £50 a year to read our digital-only journalism than we ever had people paying us £40 a year to get four print magazines delivered to their door.
God, our prices were so naïve.
TTA often takes a kinda negative skew because we’re not quite there yet and it’s been ten years and blah-blah-blah. But we’ve achieved something in this Substack stint, for sure. I should pat myself on the head more often.
But we are leaving all the same. ‘Cos here’s the kicker: to survive as a reader-supported publication without ads, our subscriber base still needs to roughly triple. At current pace, that would take about six years. It doesn’t matter how good Substack has been for us if that’s the future we’re facing - we have to try something new.
That something is building our own, brand-new website, with a built-in newsletter service.
If you’ve been paywalled from TTA in the past, here are the advantages of this plan:
- Substack takes a fuck ton of your subscription money from us every month and we’d like to keep some of it, actually
- A website allows us greater flexibility to create static, built-for-SEO content to introduce more readers to SCOUTED
- A website allows us much more freedom to create something uniquely us, and design has always been at the heart of what we do (we’re gunna just use a template out of the box to begin with, but it still looks great)
- A website is a hub, a platform, which we own entirely and can grow from - ideally combining our digital subscription with, dare I say, other e-commerce offerings sometime in the future
There’s also several disadvantages and risks we’ve considered:
- Lots of people have Substack accounts already and are ready to make a subscription purchase on a whim - conversion will be harder
- We’ll lose access to Substack’s recommendation network, which has generated lots of readers for us
- Many of our readers enjoy reading in the Substack app
- We have little technical expertise in this area and something is definitely going to break
The bottom line is three outcomes are possible: things could get slightly worse for us; things could stay the same; things could get much better. We’re willing to roll the dice.
The near future
Or: this year at SCOUTED
Over the past year or so of editing a football newsletter, I think we’ve learned quite a lot about what works in this space.
So what will a subscription to SCOUTED look like over the next few months?
You’ll get three newsletters a week in your email inbox:
- On Mondays, you’ll get - you guessed it - Monday Night SCOUTED, Jake’s immensely popular weekly analysis column
- On Wednesdays, you’ll get SCOUT NOTES - Llew’s download on everything happening to the many players on his endless shortlist of talent
- On Fridays, you’ll get THE EDITORIAL, by me. Defector was the original inspiration for me in 2023 and I’m again shamelessly stealing from their Blogs of the Week newsletter, which I read every Friday. This will be a curated roundup and excerpt of the Featured Stories on SCOUTED that week - anything we published that wasn’t a newsletter
Let me explain that last point a little further. Currently, everything we write is published as a newsletter and lands in your inbox. Moving forward, that won’t be the case.
A while ago I had a conversation with the excellent Flo Lloyd-Hughes from the excellent The Cutback and something we discussed stuck with me: how the idea of getting more from a digital subscription is actually a big turn-off for us. We’re both professionals in this space and have more time and incentive to read about football than most, and yet the idea of our inboxes being crammed full of stories makes us miserable.
There’s a few things at work here.
One, publishing more newsletters does look good in the short term. Number go up.
Two, five english pounds a month is a lot of money to ask our readers for and there’s a subliminal desire to provide value for it; value which too easily becomes volume. After all, look at what The Athletic offers for roughly the same price.
Three, newsletters get opened and read, and not publishing stories as a newsletter on Substack kinda buries them.
However, I’ve spent the last year iterating, fiddling, experimenting and researching (by reading every newsletter I think is good on the internet). And here’s the thing: we can never compete with The Athletic on volume. The New York Times Co has 5,900 employees and made $2.43billion in operating revenue last year. We are three dudes and one of us is a farmer.
I think if small magazines are to compete in the same space (we’re all just fighting for a sliver of your attention, after all) we have to offer something different and we have to pick our moments. I want SCOUTED to occupy less of our reader’s minds but to leave real quality where it does. We don’t want you to feel like we’re aggressively vying for your time, but we do want you to feel good when we drop you an email, because you know you’re about to read something authored and creative and interesting.
So, £5 for three newsletters you won’t find anywhere else. But we will publish more, and direct you to it via THE EDITORIAL. And by building our own website with strong SEO fundamentals, that ancillary content will have a chance to find its own audience beyond our email list.
And that £5 will unlock everything on the website, of course. Every paywall, every story. Over time, we’d like to build a resource that’s worth spending time with: somewhere to come when you need information on a player you know SCOUTED is likely to cover better than anyone else. This will take time, and the work begins next week.
Final point: SCOUTED used to be a platform for otherwise lesser-known writers to find their groove. We offered good rates, a broad audience, and a respected editorial process that emphasised a writer’s voice and expertise and put them in front of readers that valued it. Because our financial pressures are so great, we’ve had to reserve our resources and cut back on commissions entirely. This feels…wrong.
We won’t have the bandwidth to hire freelancers again for some time. But it is part of our history and part of the reason I’m even here, doing this at all. My hope is our website will allow us more space and freedom to cover more things without clogging your inbox, and hopefully that will include well-paid work from other writers and artists. But it all hinges on people signing up.
If you have any questions at all about the future of SCOUTED, hit up the comments section below.
And go read The Cutback, btw:
The future, in a dream
Or: the ultimate outcome
So where is this all going, exactly?
I often lose sight of why I’m in this job at all. I began SCOUTED because I wanted to write and edit, an activity I do precious little of these days (that’s why TTA is always so fucking long: it’s the rare moment every month I get to spend time solely doing the work I love). Most of my time over the past 18 months or so has been trying desperately to figure out how to build a small football media business without start-up resource. The website is just another step in that direction.
But the past 18 months have also felt a little…unmooring. I’m so far from the creative day-to-day I’d hoped for that I get lost in the weeds. So this year, the team and I have decided to remember our dream outcome, the reason we’ve quit our normal jobs to do badly paid labour in the first place, the mountain we’re so desperate to summit.
Of course, that’s the return of our print magazine.
A tweet when gently viral recently. Someone discovered their old copy of Volume VI of The Handbook - the volume that sits proudly on my desk, that I keep in view to remind me to keep going - and hundreds of people began commenting, sharing and discussing our immense ‘hit rate’, completely independent of our involvement.
We did NOT include Bukayo Saka as a defender. That is FAKE NEWS.
The Handbook - or simply SCOUTED, as a return would be called - was really, really good. It was put together by three guys who had absolutely no experience with editorial design but learned and improved as they went. It was produced entirely in-house. It was cheap to make. It sold well considering our size and reach at the time. It lasted for three years and twelve editions. People loved it. People built entire shelves just to display their collections. What the hell. That’s the coolest thing.
If you weren’t familiar, every edition of The Handbook was simple: 25 reports on 25 talents, written by scouts who’d watched them, in a beautifully designed package full of art and photography, wrapped in gorgeous collectible covers. Easy to understand, easy to market, and different and distinct from every other print magazine in the space.
Everything we’ve done over the past 18 months - every hour I’ve spent at this desk, every minute Jake and Steve have spent writing, every cow Llew has milked with his cold, bare hands - has been in service of that cool thing. To have something in the world we made, we’re proud of, that people enjoy.
We have a really good product here. With stronger fundamentals in place to help us find more readers, and with a few years of personal development, maturity and brand growth behind us, it could live again. That’s the dream - and what are we doing here, if not to dream?
Ultimately, I want SCOUTED to offer an all-in-one subscription: great online content and newsletters, plus a quarterly print magazine, in a niche that is underserved but holds massive untapped potential. I want this all to serve a small team of writers who get to make a living, and a much larger pool of writers and artists who get paid fairly in a world that increasingly disregards their talents.
And that’s why we’re moving to our own website.
I am going to begin to be more bullish about this once we’re up and rolling, and this is usually done behind close doors, but what the hell, I guess few read this far anyway: if you have the resources to help us bring SCOUTED back to print and think a partnership could be mutually beneficial, please get in touch.
You can find the Editor-in-Chief at tom@scoutedftbl.com.
I’d like to end the TTA Substack era by just saying thank you.
I focus a lot on what needs to happen next in these blogs, but I’m trying to get better at reflecting on what’s worked. And what’s worked is you lot. SCOUTED is still here, because of you.
If you read our work for free, thank you. If you pay for our work, thank you. Thousands of you choose to spend your time with us; hundreds of you pay for the privilege. Neither, these days, is easy. I’m grateful. I still can’t believe we make something people care about. It hasn’t yet sunk in and I don’t think it ever will.
Whatever the future holds - whether this move goes so badly we’re dead next month, or whether I’m triumphantly unveiling the return of the magazine this summer - it’s been a life-defining ride. I don’t know where I’d be without you all and I promise never to take your readership for granted.
Thank you,
Tom
