The First Soccer Web Site I Ever Visited
What was the first soccer web site you remember visiting?
For me, my memory is a little dusty but I do remember being in college in 1996 and my professor was raving about the Mosaic web browser in one of her classes. Around that time, I remember using a bunch of different services to access the Internet. One was Prodigy, which was partly owned by Sears. Another was CompuServe. Then we had some terminals in the college library. And I started using AOL around that time, too. One of the services, I can’t remember which, listed the results from English matches.
But the first soccer web site I remember visiting, and visiting frequently, was Soccernet — which, at that time, was owned by The Daily Mail newspaper in England before they sold it to ESPN in 1999.
The design of the site was extremely primitive (click on the above image for a close-up) or see more examples here and here. But it was my first love in terms of soccer sites before I later discovered the BBC Sport site.
While ESPN has obviously taken the Soccernet brand and completely enhanced it, I wonder in hindsight whether the Daily Mail regrets selling the site to ESPN. The current Daily Mail site is extremely poor, but I would imagine that the Daily Mail brand was much more popular in the late 90′s because of the web site. It was the first English newspaper that jumped to my mind back then. Now, I hardly even think about it or consider purchasing a copy when I’m in England.
What was your first soccer web site you visited?
5 Responses to The First Soccer Web Site I Ever Visited
First footie website? Marca dotcom, brilliant & ahead of its time it was! As La Liga matches were in progress they’d put up stills of the gol scenes taken from a telly! Incredible stats even to this day.
You’ve lost nowt by not going near the Daily Mail.
My first site was Carlingweb – but this has been a good stroll down memory lane – Compuserve, Mosaic (which I used in college back in 1994 and 5.) Sadly enough footy websites havent come that far since then, the availability of footy footage isnt exactly prevalent. I get my footy videos from youtube because the clubs have locked up their own footage behind subscriptions. Only football365.com with its video news has really shown innovation. Here’s hoping the next 10 years sees some real advancement. (Also i live outside the UK these days so I dont get to access all Sky’s goodies so i cant speak to them).
The first site that I checked out for soccer news was the BBC. I was reading something else from the site and decided to see what the “Football” link was
That was my introduction to the word for what us colonials call soccer!
Thanks for sharing
my first website i visited was goal.com.being a small