Priesty's Rants

Why Call It A Refuge ?
I call it a refuge because here the commercially-orientated interests that have hijacked football have no place. Having no advertising or merchandising guarantees my independence. It is also your guarantee that what you see on the site is as free from interference as is possible at a time when the Football Association are using the threat of lawsuits to restrict the rights of private citizens to publish any information which the FA claim is their intellectual property, including fixtures and match reports.

Unfortunately it's also why you don't see any pictures on the site - the FA discourage the picture agencies from letting unofficial sites use the pics, and even if they didn't adopt this highly immoral, restrictive practice I couldn't afford the agencies' prices anyway.

The FA's intellectual property claims, along with their determination to throttle unofficial sites, are at best dubious. In a fair and decent world I would be able to take them on in the courts, but they are cynically relying on the fact that small sites like mine don't have the clout or the financial resources to do so.

The FA and most of the football clubs have cottoned on to the fact that there is money to be made from the internet (at least there was until recently), and it has clearly blinded them to the fact that sites like this are an asset, not a threat to their revenue streams. Another reason for trying to outgun the unofficial sites is that it makes it easy for them to ignore dissenters among the fans. This has led to us having virtually no voice and no say in the way the game is run, thus providing them with a free rein. Piss poor, don't you think ?

Not that this really bothers me. My site has been here for more than 11 years - five years longer than the FA's site, and longer even than the Chelsea official site and the vast majority of other internet sites. I reckon I will still be here after they have faded from sight when the present TV-fuelled bubble bursts, which will not be very long by the look of things. Perhaps then we can get back to being football supporters, rather than the unwilling pawns of big business. Fuck off, Mastercard/Continental/Barclays/ McDonalds, etc !