Welcome to the new SCOUTED
A new era for the future of football
Dear readers,
Exciting news! We've completed the move to our website.
Well, almost completed. Unfortunately it's taken several days longer than expected for Substack to remove their fees from our subscriptions (they still haven't done so as of writing), but we couldn't wait any longer.
So, we're coming at you live, from the new and improved SCOUTED! We're so glad you're here.
The new domain is scoutedftbl.com. The old domain, scoutednotebook, should now redirect to the new place. The Substack still exists but will be deleted as soon as we get notice they've removed their fees.
Anyway - we wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you to the new place, show you around, and answer any FAQ's in one place.
Oh, and the football starts tonight: Monday Night SCOUTED drops in a few short hours. Stay tuned.
Some stuff might be broken
First, we want to emphasise one of our core reasons for making this switch: the ability to build something distinctly ours.
The design and general functionality of the new site will undergo constant evolution as we work over the coming months. What you see now is not the final look or feel - we're literally just using an out-of-the-box theme right now, and are saving our pennies to build a custom site sometime soon.
We'd be grateful for any feedback, and will drop you an email when we make a notable change we'd like eyes on. If you just read emails and don't want to use the site much, no worries.
Furthermore, we've imported 290+ posts from our old Substack. Our new platform, Ghost, does a great job of auto-formatting those posts, but the switch has still required some significant manual tweaks on our end. This has been a big job and we will have missed stuff - so please forgive any botched formatting in these first few weeks. If you spot anything egregious, give us a shout.
Also, we'd love it if you could save SCOUTED to your home screens, so you can best replicate the feel of opening the Substack app.
If you're on Android: tap three dots menu > add to Home Screen
Many thanks to subscriber Manny for that suggestion, and for his help with the move.
With that said, click the button below to have a look around! Then come back to read the FAQ's, please and thank you.
FAQ’s
Do I need to do anything?
No. Free or paid subscriber, you're all set. Prices are not changing and you don’t need to renew or re-enter your card details.
We’ve simply disconnected Substack from our Stripe account, which handles all our payments and memberships.
Your monthly subscription will still unlock all our newsletters, writing and journalism. There are new tiers of subscriptions for those of us who’d like to support us further, but they are entirely voluntary and don’t unlock any new features (yet).
All readers are now on our 'Reader' membership, which contains all the benefits it once did on Substack - it just has a new name.
If you'd like to support our venture by upgrading your membership to a new tier, you can do so by visiting your account page/portal.
We also have a tip jar now! So if you appreciate your work enough to donate something a little extra, you can do so here.
If any unexpected changes affect your subscription, please let us know as soon as possible by reaching our new support email: hello@scoutedftbl.com.
Will I still get email newsletters?
Yes. We’ll still drop you three email newsletters a week - Monday Night SCOUTED on Mondays, SCOUT NOTES on Wednesdays, and a new feature called THE EDITORIAL on Friday mornings.
These will continue to drop into your email inbox as they do now.
We're also running a new autoresponder through our partners at Outpost. This will take some time for us to get used to, so please forgive any errant emails in this warming-up period.
Has any content disappeared?
No. We’ve ported all of Notebook’s content directly to the new site.
Your comments have disappeared, unfortunately - not much we can do about that. Unless you can each remember every comment you ever left, revisit those pages, and re-type them exactly? Yes, that seems reasonable. Let's do that.
We’re also adding some gaming content to help attract new readers to the site, but you don’t need to worry about that if you’re not interested - it won’t touch our newsletters.
If you can’t find a particular piece or have feedback on navigation, please let us know.
Anything else we need to know?
Guys, something’s gunna break, or go missing, or not make sense, or look stupid. We’ve prepped as much as possible, but can’t really simulate thousands of real readers logging in and fiddling.
If you run into any problems, find any bugs or otherwise have something goofy to report, please find us at hello@scoutedftbl.com. Thanks so much!
We’re so grateful to you all for reading and supporting our work on Substack over the past 18-ish months. This new website is a big step towards becoming a sustainable and modern online magazine, and we hope you’ll stick around for the journey.
A new era begins. Forza SCOUTED.
Tom, Llew, Jake and the team
