• Phil Macgiollabhain On Twitter
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Phil MacGiollabhain was nominated as Best Established Blog and the Clumpany for Best New Blog. To be honest, I only occasionally read the latter and almost never read the former. That’s not to have a go at the work they do. Author Phil Posted on 14th April 2021 Categories Uncategorised Leave a comment on Kicking an Irishman when he is down has a long history in Scotland The piece process I got a chance to have a longish chat with Source A today, and I was reminded of when I spent a.

I don’t know The Clumpany personally. I don’t know Phil MacGiollabhain personally. I read their things sometimes and don’t have much of an opinion. But here comes a rant anyway…

I don’t want to sound like I’ve got sour grapes here but the shortlist for the Football Blogging Awards was released recently. I do have an ego but wasn’t expecting anything because it’s not something I put a whole lot of promotion into on twitter and social media. I like to think that if I do good enough work, I’ll eventually end up with some recognition without putting myself out for approval regularly. Phil MacGiollabhain was nominated as Best Established Blog and the Clumpany for Best New Blog.

To be honest, I only occasionally read the latter and almost never read the former. That’s not to have a go at the work they do. The Clumpany is a fairly humorous writer who doesn’t take himself overly seriously and can elicit a chuckle. Mr MacGiollabhain has a style that, bluntly, I find deathly dull. I’m sure, if I went out for a pint with either, there’d be plenty in common, plenty to chat about and we’d have a jolly good time.

But this concept that they are the best gets to me. Popular? Yes. Connect with a lot of people? Yes. The Best?

I fail to see how blogs that are essentially single issue lobbying groups can be the best. I fail to see how they can even represent Scottish Football, because no effort is made to represent anything other than a Celtic/Rangers dichotomy. They are to the rest of Scottish football what the Tea Party are to America - an extreme niche unwaveringly focusing on a couple of issues that leaves people thinking they’re a bit nutty. I’d rather sit here as an unpopular Richard Wilson than spend a day as Donald Clump.

But this niche is horribly all encompassing. The Clumpany will point to his readership stats which sit well over 1 million in the few months he’s run his site. And that’s great - it’s great that enough people are interested in Scottish football to sustain that level of demand. Those people aren’t then going elsewhere to find other stuff.

If you google Scottish football blog, I’m on the front page and let me be quite honest here and tell you - my readership is far far less than that of either Mr Macgiollabhain’s or The Clumpany’s site - success for me is 100k a year. I am able to somehow be mentioned in the same search page as Scotzine and Pie and Bovril on comparatively small numbers. The conclusion? People are more interested in reading about single issues than about the actual whole of Scottish football.

There are several talented people out there blogging and doing it about every club and every subject who don’t get the credit they deserve because the crowd isn’t drawn naturally towards their chosen subject or, more concerningly, the breadth of their subject.

I have no doubt that when they announce the winners at Hotel Football in a glitzy ceremony where, presumably, succulent lamb will be on the menu, The Clumpany will be amongst them given their exceptionally canny use of social media. And for that I offer extremely premature congratulations.

I also feel it’s a pity that the only blogs on Scottish football people think are really worth promoting deal with such a narrow subject. If one looks at similar blogs on England, one would point to Sporting Intelligence and Swiss Ramble, both of whom cover a hell of a lot more than one club and their significant issues with significantly less volume and, likely, uncover far more interesting stuff in there. It may be easier to joke about Mark Warburton being magic (presumably, he currently resides in a cupboard under the marble staircase), but surely it is more worthy to cover everyone.

Now, I am hardly a saint in this. I can freely admit that I started off making blogs about Rangers in 2012 (as was everyone) but ended up doing a hell of a lot more than that to the extent that I’d identify more with non-partisan blogs than with single club or single issue blogs.

(By the way, we must surely be the only nation in football that can have single issue blogs on football)

That is what I want to be and I try to cover a wider range of issues than many sites because, from my own perspective, I want to cover Scottish football, not simply Celtic, who I support, or Rangers, which many do. Our nation is about 42 and more clubs who form the fabric of our game, not two.

Scotland is certainly renowned for single issue blogs nowadays, thanks to the independence referendum which has resulted in the often cringeworthy phenomenon of assuming every journalist has an agenda and it’s not yours. These are well known within the derisively titled “Cybernats” movement (which is simply a reflection of the bipolar partisan nature of the debate) but were borne out of and are most prevalent in the type of person who writes and devours such blogs as those of Mr MacGiollabhain and The Clumpany.

Journalists, like every employed person in the world, have an agenda and are biased in favour of keeping their job. An essential part of this is keeping contacts and not burning bridges. Sometimes, I see fans replying to football journalists and I simply turn red with embarrassment and, sharing a name as I do with a BBC Scotland football writer, I even get the odd mistaken Twitter identity demanding I tell the truth about Rangers or Dave King or whatever bug bear people have that particular week.

That sort of action discourages real journalists from speaking freely or even speaking at all. If one asked, for example, a journalist at the Glasgow Evening Times why they don’t publish the truth about Rangers and they then go and put a story out that Rangers are Dead, etc, what happens is that that journalist loses access or even their whole publication because, whether you call it publishing an opinion or publishing an uncomfortable truth, people will be riled up about it. If you cover a two-club town and piss off everyone from one of the clubs, you suddenly lose your relevance and your contacts, which could easily result in the loss of your income. There are a significant number of uncomfortable truths out there that can’t be published because of legal issues, libel/defamation issues or simply because it would be personally counterproductive. The reason the journalist you’re criticising isn’t publishing what you want them to isn’t because there’s some giant conspiracy - it’s because there’s a time and a place and it isn’t now. It might be waiting for something else or it might be reliant legal issues disappearing. It certainly won’t be because that individual journalist doesn’t want to and having a go at them for it is like telling a Starbucks barista off because Starbucks doesn’t pay tax.

And that’s really the issue. No one would ever begrudge the nominated writers their success, but it comes at the detriment of football debate in Scotland as a whole. It forces the extremes of the debate further apart and means that those commentators who reside in the middle of the two parties, either through professional or personal reasons, end up mistrusted or, even worse, seen as dishonest for simply being moderate. Scotland having one of the most involved and educated fan bases in the world counts for nothing if it’s being influenced most by divisions than unity.

So while whoever wins, wins, I can only hope that this time next year, those nominated from Scottish football represent the entirety of Scottish football, not just a narrow schism. That would be best for everyone.

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Phil Macgiollabhain On Twitter

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