Review of Clever Football: Social Networking for Soccer Fans

Some of you may remember Phil from the Soccer Shout podcast that was a daily listening ritual for many of you around the world. At the end of last season, Phil decided to hang up his podcasting boots to devote his time to a new venture. A social networking site for soccer fans entitled Clever Football.

The site has gone through many itterations during the past several months as Phil has continued to test and tweak new features that soccer fans will appreciate. The technology behind the site is Ning, which was created by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame. So the amount of features available are pretty impressive (and intuitive).

With Clever Football, you can create your own page and add:

• Videos,
• A blog,
• Photos,
• RSS feeds,
• Comments,
• Friends,
• Message forums,
• and much more.

A couple of Clever Football’s unique features include a match ratings system that allows you and other fans to vote on the Premier League matches just played to tell people whether they’re worth watching or not (perfect for fans who tape games via DVR).

Another feature is called Chunter, which sounds a bit foreign, but is a way for you to decide which fellow soccer fans on Clever Football that you’d like to ‘listen’ to so you can read their updates. To me, it’s a better feature than Facebook’s friends. With Facebook, you see all of the updates from your friends no matter what. With Chunter at Clever Football, you can decide which of your friends you want to receive updates from rather than all of them.

Clever Football faces some tough competition in the ‘social networking for soccer fans’ category including Ole Ole and FanBanta, but Clever Football’s advantage is that it’s running on the Ning network which is one of the most cutting edge social networking platforms.

Give Clever Football a test drive by signing up today and creating your own page — and add your friends. And when you get a chance, take a look at EPL Talk’s page on Clever Football.

Visit Clever Football – A Social Network for Football / Soccer Fans