About

Who We Are

FootballNews Pty Ltd
ACN: 124 947 780

167 Grote Street
Adelaide SA 5000

Email: webmaster@footballnews.com.au

Contact FootballNews via email or by using the contact form on the Contact Us page.

Our Mission

  • To promote Australian football.
  • To provide an independent voice for the most important stakeholders in Australian football – the supporters.
  • To foster understanding and break down the traditional barriers in the football community that have held back the sport in Australia.
  • To demonstrate to the wider community the underlying popularity and strength of local football.

Our History

The FootballNews site was first established in 1998. It started out as a project to develop an .asp toolkit of functions to support database driven websites. The .asp tools were developed and SoccerNews, as it was then named, was created to test them.

There was no fanfare about the launch of SoccerNews. After all its purpose was to test the .asp toolkit and at the same time do a little promotion of the local game. It went online quietly. But word of mouth spread quickly and the test site quickly became very quite popular.

While we continued to enhance the .asp toolkit, the popularity of the site grew and grew. We were surprised by its popularity. Despite its largely South Australian focus and its un-official status, SoccerNews was ranked in the top five soccer websites in Australia. Before long we had dropped our focus on testing our .asp toolkit – and were now focused on improving the functionality of SoccerNews to promote the local game.

At the time of its development SoccerNews was utilising leading edge technology and techniques. The back-end was was quite sophisticated though the front end of the site was quite basic. One problem area was the performance of the site – there was an irritating performance problem that would inexplicably crop up every few months grinding the site to a halt. Over several years we spent months trawling over all the code underlying the site in search of the cause of the performance problem. We incorrectly believed there had to be a fault in the programming. Then we discovered others who were having similar problems. Soon it became obvious that the cause of the problem was a bug in the Microsoft IIS webserver software – a bug Microsoft had known about for several years but had not fixed. We immediately decided it was time to move to a more robust and open software platform.

In late 2003 we commenced planning FootballNews v2. We developed a functional specification, a database specification and selected new hardware and software platforms. By mid 2004 we commenced the coding phase utilising one part time programmer. The project moved forward slowly. We had under-estimated the amount of code that we had created over the five plus years of SoccerNews v1. So by mid 2005 we put a second programmer onto the project.

By the end of 2005 the original project was nearing completion. However we decided there was no need to rush the project into production and opted to add some further functionality. The project was finally completed in March 2006 and FootballNews v2 was launched on the 31st of March 2006.

The launch of FootballNews v2 further increased the popularity of the site. But with increased popularity came increased problems. FootballNews is a non-profit venture run by volunteers but this fact seemed to matter little to some. As the site’s popularity increased, so did the legal threats from a large multinational media organisation. The demands of the large media organisation bordered on the ridiculous and FootballNews went very close to closing down on several occasions rather than battle it out in a court room. Infamously some a “half eaten sausage roll” brought FootballNews to the verge of closure. But FootballNews stood its ground and the large multinational media organisation eventually relented.

At the time of developing FootballNews v2, there was little available information on local football and the mainstream media was aggressively anti-football. At that time if you suggested you would be able to watch a game with a full house at Hindmarsh Stadium, you would have been laughed out of the room. A good crowd at Hindmarsh Stadium was 4,000 fans. Over the life of FootballNews, we have seen significant changes. Football has shifted from being regarded as an ethnic sport to a sport played by all Australians. The advent of video streaming services has has opened up access to international football content. Social media platforms have changed the way people receive information. The Australian media has lost its ability to throttle what sport Australians consume and football has become a mainstream Australian sport.

With these changes, there was no longer a need for FootballNews to operate as news, results, match reporting and information source. So FootballNews stepped back from these resource intensive activities. This left a lot of redundant functionality on the site. In 2020 FootballNews v3 was launched with the focus on removing all the redundant functionality and simplifying the site.

Its been a fantastic journey and we hope you continue to enjoy the latest iteration of FootballNews.

Credits

There are many individuals who have contributed to FootballNews since 1998. Here is a list of some of the major contributors.

Site Coders:
Grant Williamson v1
Karl Castle v1 & v2
Andrew Duxworth v2

Site Specifications:
Matthew Berry v2
Warwick Groves v2

Photographer:
Adam Butler