The State of The Offside one year on

It was a year ago today that the Internet and your lives were forever changed. It was on August 1, 2006 that The Offside went from being a mere yearning in our collective groins into a real, live, breathing Web site. After all the fun we had on World Cup Blog, the good folks at BootsnAll fired up this site with the intention of offering a place for football fans to come together and learn about the deviant sexual habits of their favorite players. I’d say we have succeeded. Instead of patting ourselves on the back and drinking ourselves into an oblivion (we do that on most days, after all), I thought it would be a novel idea to give you an idea of how the site is doing. Consider this a blog annual report.

Visitors
According to the Alexa rankings, The Offside is currently the 56,922th most visited site on the Web. Damn porn sites always hurt our rankings. Over the past year the site has had 1.3 million visits and has served up 3.06 million pageviews. To put this into perspective, World Cup Blog had 1.9 million visits and 8.3 million pageviews in just June 2006 alone. The scale of the site is smaller, but that said, the number of visits to The Offside has increased every month and by 2047 we will be bigger than Google. That is a promise.

Most Visited Blogs
This site started out as just a lone blog that contained my drivel. Today, we have something along the lines of 50 blogs covering teams and leagues from the world over. One of our goals was to give fans an opportunity to share their passion for their team. I think we have succeeded on this front and then some.

While it isn’t really fair to compare blog traffic numbers because some blogs are much older and newer than others, here are The Offside blogs that have had the most visits over the past year.

1. Italy
2. LA Galaxy
3. Arsenal
4. Liverpool
5. Manchester United
6. Roma
7. Brazil
8. Lyon
9. Chelsea
10. Barcelona

Most Viewed Posts
Everyone comes to The Offside for hard hitting journalism, right? After you take a look at the posts that have been viewed the most you might think otherwise. You perverts.

1. A Sunderland Sex Tap just in time for the Holidays

2. The Naked Pics of Ana Paula de Oliveira

3. New Arsenal Kit

4. Lionel Messi Scores a Maradona Goal

5. Posing Nude for Playboy won’t advance your Refereeing Career

6. A Ball Boy Scores a Goal and it Counts

7. Andres Vasquez Scores a Goal beyond Description

8. Top 10 Richest Football Players and Owners in England

9. Judge: You can no longer watch Ronaldo’s Ex-Wife having Sex on YouTube

10. Cristiano Ronaldo Gets Cuddly with Bollywood’s Bipasha Basu

Sites that have sent the most traffic our way
No matter how good or bad your site may be no one will know about it until they hear about it from others. The great thing about the soccer blogosphere is that the various blogs and sites are not reluctant to link to one another. The Offside wouldn’t have the readership it does today if it weren’t for all the sites that have linked to us. Thanks to each and every one of you.

Here are the top referrals from the past year. Who knew we were so huge in Poland? It must be the shared love of vodka

1. Sports.pl
2. Deadspin
3. With Leather
4. SoccerBlogs.net
5. Big Soccer
6. Digg
7. Walkon
8. Fark
9. Who Ate all the Pies
10. Olympique-et-lyonnais.com

What’s in store for the future?

• Global world domination is one goal.
• Continuing to have fun and to build an online soccer community are a couple other objectives.
• In the coming months we’ll probably finally get around to changing the design of both World Cup Blog and The Offside so that they are easier to navigate and so that they better show off the writing of our talented corps of bloggers.
• We’re also excited about our fantasy league partnership with SquadGod and we hope to come up with more entertaining ways for us all to share our love for the Beautiful Game together.

Your feedback
We’d love to hear your thoughts about The Offside. What do you like? What don’t you like? What features would you like to see? Why are you so interested in a Brazilian referee’s breasts? Feel free to fire away in the comments section or if you want to drop me a line please do so – bob [at] theoffside.com

Thank you
I could make a list of names of people who should be thanked, but that list would be longer than this already too long post. Instead, I will thank all of you for contributing to the site in your own special way. Hugs and kisses.

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Category: World Football