Before The Boom And Beyond
by Kevin Watkin
Beginnings
Unusually, for someone born in New Zealand, I attended my first game of live football before going to a rugby game. My uncle took me to Wellington’s Basin Reserve to see Mount Wellington beat Miramar 1-0 in extra-time in the 1982 Chatham Cup final, 13 days before my parents took me to see Wellington lose the Ranfurly Shield to Canterbury. I supported Mt. Wellington on the day, mistakenly thinking they were local team (Mt Wellington is a suburb in Auckland, while Miramar is in Wellington). Given Mt. Wellington were reasonably successful for the next decade, it was one of the few times I have chosen wisely when throwing my lot in with a team.1982 was a big year for football, both for me and New Zealand. It was the year I watched New Zealand play at their first World Cup (although I don’t remember anything about their qualifying campaign), watched my first English FA Cup final (Spurs v QPR), and began playing junior football. It was also the year I made the first of many poor football choices.
In rugby-mad New Zealand, the only football we saw on TV was a weekly British highlights show, “Big League Soccer” hosted by Brian Moore, and shown a week after the fixtures were played. One of first games I recall seeing was Watford winning convincingly in Division One.. The Hornets had just gained successive promotions from the Fourth Division to the First, thanks to Elton John’s financial backing. Watford became my team, and John Barnes my favourite player. I was going through a period where I was supporting teams that opposed my father’s chosen teams. As a result, when Watford finished 2nd to my father’s Liverpool side that season, I convinced myself I was onto a winner. Little did I know about “big” and “small” clubs. Watford began finishing progressively lower each season, lost an FA Cup Final, sold John Barnes (to Liverpool, of all clubs), and were finally relegated about the same time English football disappeared from New Zealand screens.
Early Glimpses of Thai Football
I moved to Thailand for the first time at the end of 1999. I regularly spent weekend evenings at my friend Stephen’s house watching English Premier League games (I’d switched allegiance to Arsenal when they signed Dennis Bergkamp). I was also a frequent visitor to a local nightclub where, by simply asking the bouncer, “How are you?” I would learn whether Manchester United had won or not, and correspondingly, whether he had made money on his illicit bets that evening.
As far as the local game went, I was aware of the results via the Bangkok Post and the Nation newspapers, and saw occasional snippets of live games on TV while at restaurants. My initial impressions were of the uninspiring names of the teams (Stock Exchange of Thailand, Bangkok Bank, etc), and that the games on TV seem to have an attendance of the proverbial two men and their dog. Around this time, Stephen had a letter published in the Bangkok Post, calling for the Thai league to become more geographically diverse, in order to develop provincial rivalries to boost attendances.
I moved to Thailand for the first time at the end of 1999. I regularly spent weekend evenings at my friend Stephen’s house watching English Premier League games (I’d switched allegiance to Arsenal when they signed Dennis Bergkamp). I was also a frequent visitor to a local nightclub where, by simply asking the bouncer, “How are you?” I would learn whether Manchester United had won or not, and correspondingly, whether he had made money on his illicit bets that evening.
As far as the local game went, I was aware of the results via the Bangkok Post and the Nation newspapers, and saw occasional snippets of live games on TV while at restaurants. My initial impressions were of the uninspiring names of the teams (Stock Exchange of Thailand, Bangkok Bank, etc), and that the games on TV seem to have an attendance of the proverbial two men and their dog. Around this time, Stephen had a letter published in the Bangkok Post, calling for the Thai league to become more geographically diverse, in order to develop provincial rivalries to boost attendances.
On a local level, I recall passing through the local university one afternoon, and seeing what looked like an organised match going on, and later in my stay, I attended a charity match with some friends between a Kamphaeng Phet XI and a team made up of celebrities from one of Thailand’s TV/music stables. The match finished with a typical festival match score of something like 7-5, and was really only memorable for the torrential downpour during the game, which led to the plenty of amusing slips and slides, and passes getting stuck on the waterlogged pitch.
In late 2000, I was introduced to the Asian Cup for the first time, following Thailand’s fortunes in Lebanon, including making new friends at a bar in one night in Phichit, cheering on the Thais in one of their matches. I was fortunate to see the competition firsthand in 2007, attending three group matches hosted at Rajamangala Stadium.
I left Thailand for the UK in 2001, where the wall-to-wall football coverage made a lasting impression. I returned in 2004 after a spell in South Korea where I’d attended a couple of World Cup matches, and a handful of K-League matches, despite having the misfortune of living in a province without a K-League team.
Again, the Thai league didn’t make much impression on me, although I remember bigwigs making noises about bringing in a Provincial League as a 2nd tier, and that rounds of the Thai League were going to be played outside Bangkok. My wife and I also travelled to Bangkok to see Jurgen Klinsmann’s German side defeat Thailand 5-1 at Rajamangala Stadium.
Returning for the Boom
I moved to Thailand for the third time in 2009, after another spell in South Korea. While in the process of settling in and finding work, I discovered in the press that the rebranded Thai Premier League was getting larger attendances, and that a few non-institutional clubs had appeared. Once I’d found work (in Bangkok), I began the serious process of finding a team to follow. I was determined not to adopt one of the “institutional” teams (Army, Police, Air Force, etc) in favour of a “place name” team. Unfortunately, most of these, such as Chonburi and Nakon Patom, were ruled out due to geography. Stephen’s vision at the beginning of the millennium was becoming a reality.
My first taste of the new Thai Premier League was at (old) Leo Stadium, to see the top two teams, Bangkok Glass and Muang Thong United. At this stage, I was tempted to pick Muang Thong as my team, given they were a team with an identifiable location, had just been promoted, and were shaking up the old order. However, in that week’s press, the club stated that they wanted to be the “Manchester United of Thailand”, which somewhat dampened my enthusiasm for the upstarts. I ended up sitting with the BG fans on the overcrowded, sunny terraces, as their team won 1-0.
I left Leo Stadium still undecided about who my Thai club would be, although Bangkok Glass had made a decent case, despite being a ‘company’ club. A few months later, I went to Chulalongkorn University for Chula Utd vs Samut Songkram. Admittedly, this was only a half-hearted attempt, as I’d worked in a office full of Chula graduates a few years earlier. The collective combination of smugness and incompetence of their clique meant that any relationship between me and the Pink Panthers was doomed before it began. The dire football served up in the 0-0 draw did nothing to rescue their cause.
My final attempt in 2009 was attending the FA Cup tie between Thai Port and Nakhon Rachasima. I was supporting the Swat Cats, as they represented my wife’s home province, but as they were in the regional Division 2, they weren’t a realistic prospect for week-in, week-out support. I enjoyed the atmosphere at PAT Stadium, as the home side won 3-1.
My quest took me to over 20 matches in 2010, as I bounced between the home grounds of Thai Port, BEC Tero (then at Thepsahadin Stadium), and Muang Thong Utd in the TPL. Towards the end of the season, I got behind Khon Kaen’s Division 1 promotion charge, going to a few away games in the capital, enjoying their success in becoming the first north-eastern team to gain promotion to the TPL. I bought a Khon Kaen shirt on the way outside Air Force’s ground, and found myself warmly welcomed by the away fans. I sat with them for 3 or 4 games around Bangkok, while explaining I was keen to see them increase the geographical spread of the TPL. The trips to their games at Air Force and Suwannaphum Customs continued the development of my love of getting around on Bangkok on matchdays via public transport, which had begun in 2007 with the Asian Cup, with my discovery of klong taxi as the best way to get to Rajamangala Stadium.
Lat Krabang 54 is my favourite Thai ground to visit, despite the Skytrain/bus/minivan journey, which seems to take longer than the match, and still leaves you needing a motorcycle taxi, songthaew, or a sympathetic football fan to get you the last couple of kilometres from the main road to the stadium.
After Khon Kaen had secured promotion, I then began treks out to Bang Mod, to follow Bangkok FC’s Division 2 playoff campaign.
I’d come across Bangkok FC earlier in the season, seeing them play Port in the League Cup, a match which sowed the seeds of them becoming eventually becoming my 2nd team, filling a void when Port were playing away.
Becoming a Port fan
Between 2006 and 2008, I’d had a season ticket holder at new K-League club Gyeongnam FC. I’d sat with active support, which contained a large number of university and middle school students, with a 50/50 gender mix. Even with my limited Korean, it seemed that almost all their chants and cheers were of the “We love Gyeongnam”/”Gyongnam Forever” type, and there was very little in the way of calling opposition players “donkeys”, or reminding them of any past indiscretions. This is quite possibly a good thing, but it was very different from my western, mostly English football background.
At a Gyeongnam match, I was shouting at the referee after one of our players was brought down on attack. From my vantage point in the stands at the other end of the pitch and across a running track (a trifling 120 metres away), it was a clear penalty. The referee waved “play on”. Meanwhile, my fellow fans continued singing their pro-Gyeongnam song. It was only once the song had ended that a few of them decided to ask the referee to check his eyesight, but the match had already progressed through several phases, and the ball was back at our end of the field. My initial impression of the Thai fans I saw at BEC Tero, Muang Thong (pre-balaclava-clad “ultras”) and Bangkok Glass, was that they were of similar composition to the Korean groups I’d come across, and a bit too happy and cheerful for my liking.
However, PAT Stadium had a completely different feel. It might have been a class thing. Just sitting in the stand at PAT before kick-off, there was definitely a rougher edge to the crowd and a sense of “if I cross a line here, I could be in trouble”. While my safety was never in question, the fans there were more involved in what was actually happening on the pitch that other groups of fans, and not averse to loudly questioning the referee’s (or opposition player’s) parentage, eyesight, or integrity. At the 2010 League Cup 2nd leg tie against Bangkok FC, disgusted by the fact they were trailing 1-3, they even turned on their own team. As the Iron Bulls attacked the Port goal late in the game, home fans cheered them on, urging them to shoot and score the winning away goal (Port had won 3-0 away in the 1st leg). Here, finally was a team I could support. The team were neither brilliant, nor relegation-bound, but frustratingly middle of the road, and the fans were cheerfully miserable about their team and the performances they were put through.
My reluctance to support a government entity meant I was still reluctant (I went to a couple of Khon Kaen’s early season away games in Bangkok). However, resistance was futile. I’d changed employer, and found myself getting off the bus outside the Port club shop on my way to work each morning. They were now officially my ‘local’ team. I’d also met a couple of Port fans, Andy and Alex, through the Thai Football forum, and had accompanied them on a couple of away trips, and more than a few home games. It was when they pointed out that I was referring to Port as “we” in a post-match discussion, that I finally succumbed, and bought a season ticket and the accompanying shirt and scarf combo.
Typically, throwing my lot in with Port led to things going bad quickly. Four of their best players, and (incredibly) the coach were sold to Buriram for a reported 20 million baht in the mid-season transfer window. The gossip was that this was to give the PAT some financial muscle, as their relationship with the club’s new benefactor and aspiring Peua Thai politician, known as “Big Ben”, was deteriorating. Despite all this money floating around, the players went months without being paid. Big Ben named himself in the squad for the second half of the season, and made at least one appearance in the League Cup.
With the guts ripped out of the team, Port were unsurprisingly poor in the latter part of the season, although relegation wouldn’t arrive until the following year. Big Ben lost his election, and disappeared into the sunset, and the players finally got paid. Somehow, the team still made it to the League Cup Final. While I’d been eying up other clubs, I’d missed Port’s triumphs in the FA Cup in 2009 and the League Cup in 2010, so it was fitting that the final I did attend was lost. Nevertheless, I did immensely enjoy being part of the Port motorcade from Klong Toei to Supachalasai Stadium, and the anomaly of watching the 2011 final in February 2012, thanks to some Buriram skulduggery.
Thai Football Forum and Thai League Football
Sometime during 2009, I stumbled across the ThaiFootball.com forum, where I found some useful information about games. After initially observing, I posted more often in 2010, as my attendance of matches also increased. Through the forum I was able to meet regular contributors like Greg (Muang Thong), Dale (Chonburi), Vinnie (Nakhon Rachasima) at games, and for the first time in a while, was making friends with more in common than simply language and occupation (EFL teacher). There was a core group of frequent posters on the forum, and as well as some useful information and history, there was plenty of advice for the Football Association of Thailand on how they should be running the game.
From my perspective, the best feature was a widget Tony added, which allowed me to input fixtures faster. I could set teams with a default home ground and kick-off time (which was aided by the TPL introducing minimum floodlight requirements) so almost all match information loaded once the home team was selected. I still had to input every fixture using dropdown menus, but it was much easier to make adjustments when needed during the season. The tables also updated automatically, once I entered the results. On the previously platform, all of this was a manual operation. Not long after our first meeting as a full group, I moved back to Korea, meaning my involvement with group was minimal, and I mostly focused on providing content.
Nigel was keen to have a “community” feel to the site, and encouraged readers to send us their articles and stories. This led to us having regular match reports from Paul (now writing for ESPN), Andy, and Brian, amongst others. Matt spent the best part of 18 months trying to find sponsorship for the site, as well as recruiting some of these writers. Many of his appointments had a similar pattern to those of Nigel’s FAT meetings; a 1 or 2 hour drive through Bangkok traffic, only to arrive and find that “Khun X is not here right now”.
He got close to a small deal with AIG Insurance (who’d done a deal that saw them covering most TPL teams), only for the manager who’d agree to the deal to move back to Europe before anything was signed. The only success Matt had was a short-lived deal with Futera, who were keen to market their on- and offline football cards in Thailand. Futera went on to take over a Regional League (Bangkok) club, and experiment with an online, fan-managed system for their team, Futera Seeker FC.
Somewhere along the line, Nigel stepped away over disagreements with how Matt and Joseph were making decisions regarding the site. Partway through 2013, Matt left the group to take on a similar, but salaried, role with Suphanburi FC. Joseph’s involvement also waned. Not a huge football fan, he’d mostly done photoshoots with players, that had been organised by Matt. Lily was still posting photos from Port games she attended regularly, but by the end of 2013, it was only Malky and I producing content on the site. In addition to the fixtures and tweets, I’d written histories/profiles of around 50 clubs, covering all TPL and Division 1 clubs (at that time), and around 15 Regional League clubs. I was also contributing guest articles to Dale’s Chonburi site, and the Asian Football Feast site.
Not long after I’d moved back to New Zealand in 2014, Nigel got back in contact with Malky and me, saying he was again taking over the running of the site (it seems his name was still on the domain name), but to avoid any potential conflict with Joseph and Tony, was moving back to the original Readyplanet platform, from Wordpress that we’d used since 2012. As this meant I would be again manually doing tables and fixtures, I advised him that due to family and work commitments, I would only be able to continue running the Twitter account. Malky provided reports for about another half season, before deciding he’d had enough, winding up his blog in the process. Nigel kept the site and Facebook page updated, and occasionally tweeted, while I covered news and results for the next two seasons, before deciding at the beginning of 2016 that I was no longer able to give so much time to the site.
It was a tough decision, as the Twitter account had about 22,000 followers at the time (a fact that amuses my friends, given my refusal to upgrade to a smartphone, and my dislike of using other social media sites). In some ways, I felt I was letting those followers down, although a number of similar accounts and sites were starting up around that time, and I realised I wasn’t so irreplaceable. In the couple of years since, the TLF site has disappeared, and Nigel has changed the Twitter handle to encompass general events in Thailand, which sadly means much of our work has disappeared, as have the discussions of the earlier, and now-defunct, forums.
In late 2000, I was introduced to the Asian Cup for the first time, following Thailand’s fortunes in Lebanon, including making new friends at a bar in one night in Phichit, cheering on the Thais in one of their matches. I was fortunate to see the competition firsthand in 2007, attending three group matches hosted at Rajamangala Stadium.
I left Thailand for the UK in 2001, where the wall-to-wall football coverage made a lasting impression. I returned in 2004 after a spell in South Korea where I’d attended a couple of World Cup matches, and a handful of K-League matches, despite having the misfortune of living in a province without a K-League team.
Again, the Thai league didn’t make much impression on me, although I remember bigwigs making noises about bringing in a Provincial League as a 2nd tier, and that rounds of the Thai League were going to be played outside Bangkok. My wife and I also travelled to Bangkok to see Jurgen Klinsmann’s German side defeat Thailand 5-1 at Rajamangala Stadium.
Returning for the Boom
I moved to Thailand for the third time in 2009, after another spell in South Korea. While in the process of settling in and finding work, I discovered in the press that the rebranded Thai Premier League was getting larger attendances, and that a few non-institutional clubs had appeared. Once I’d found work (in Bangkok), I began the serious process of finding a team to follow. I was determined not to adopt one of the “institutional” teams (Army, Police, Air Force, etc) in favour of a “place name” team. Unfortunately, most of these, such as Chonburi and Nakon Patom, were ruled out due to geography. Stephen’s vision at the beginning of the millennium was becoming a reality.
My first taste of the new Thai Premier League was at (old) Leo Stadium, to see the top two teams, Bangkok Glass and Muang Thong United. At this stage, I was tempted to pick Muang Thong as my team, given they were a team with an identifiable location, had just been promoted, and were shaking up the old order. However, in that week’s press, the club stated that they wanted to be the “Manchester United of Thailand”, which somewhat dampened my enthusiasm for the upstarts. I ended up sitting with the BG fans on the overcrowded, sunny terraces, as their team won 1-0.
I left Leo Stadium still undecided about who my Thai club would be, although Bangkok Glass had made a decent case, despite being a ‘company’ club. A few months later, I went to Chulalongkorn University for Chula Utd vs Samut Songkram. Admittedly, this was only a half-hearted attempt, as I’d worked in a office full of Chula graduates a few years earlier. The collective combination of smugness and incompetence of their clique meant that any relationship between me and the Pink Panthers was doomed before it began. The dire football served up in the 0-0 draw did nothing to rescue their cause.
My final attempt in 2009 was attending the FA Cup tie between Thai Port and Nakhon Rachasima. I was supporting the Swat Cats, as they represented my wife’s home province, but as they were in the regional Division 2, they weren’t a realistic prospect for week-in, week-out support. I enjoyed the atmosphere at PAT Stadium, as the home side won 3-1.
My quest took me to over 20 matches in 2010, as I bounced between the home grounds of Thai Port, BEC Tero (then at Thepsahadin Stadium), and Muang Thong Utd in the TPL. Towards the end of the season, I got behind Khon Kaen’s Division 1 promotion charge, going to a few away games in the capital, enjoying their success in becoming the first north-eastern team to gain promotion to the TPL. I bought a Khon Kaen shirt on the way outside Air Force’s ground, and found myself warmly welcomed by the away fans. I sat with them for 3 or 4 games around Bangkok, while explaining I was keen to see them increase the geographical spread of the TPL. The trips to their games at Air Force and Suwannaphum Customs continued the development of my love of getting around on Bangkok on matchdays via public transport, which had begun in 2007 with the Asian Cup, with my discovery of klong taxi as the best way to get to Rajamangala Stadium.
Lat Krabang 54 is my favourite Thai ground to visit, despite the Skytrain/bus/minivan journey, which seems to take longer than the match, and still leaves you needing a motorcycle taxi, songthaew, or a sympathetic football fan to get you the last couple of kilometres from the main road to the stadium.
After Khon Kaen had secured promotion, I then began treks out to Bang Mod, to follow Bangkok FC’s Division 2 playoff campaign.
I’d come across Bangkok FC earlier in the season, seeing them play Port in the League Cup, a match which sowed the seeds of them becoming eventually becoming my 2nd team, filling a void when Port were playing away.
Becoming a Port fan
Between 2006 and 2008, I’d had a season ticket holder at new K-League club Gyeongnam FC. I’d sat with active support, which contained a large number of university and middle school students, with a 50/50 gender mix. Even with my limited Korean, it seemed that almost all their chants and cheers were of the “We love Gyeongnam”/”Gyongnam Forever” type, and there was very little in the way of calling opposition players “donkeys”, or reminding them of any past indiscretions. This is quite possibly a good thing, but it was very different from my western, mostly English football background.
At a Gyeongnam match, I was shouting at the referee after one of our players was brought down on attack. From my vantage point in the stands at the other end of the pitch and across a running track (a trifling 120 metres away), it was a clear penalty. The referee waved “play on”. Meanwhile, my fellow fans continued singing their pro-Gyeongnam song. It was only once the song had ended that a few of them decided to ask the referee to check his eyesight, but the match had already progressed through several phases, and the ball was back at our end of the field. My initial impression of the Thai fans I saw at BEC Tero, Muang Thong (pre-balaclava-clad “ultras”) and Bangkok Glass, was that they were of similar composition to the Korean groups I’d come across, and a bit too happy and cheerful for my liking.
However, PAT Stadium had a completely different feel. It might have been a class thing. Just sitting in the stand at PAT before kick-off, there was definitely a rougher edge to the crowd and a sense of “if I cross a line here, I could be in trouble”. While my safety was never in question, the fans there were more involved in what was actually happening on the pitch that other groups of fans, and not averse to loudly questioning the referee’s (or opposition player’s) parentage, eyesight, or integrity. At the 2010 League Cup 2nd leg tie against Bangkok FC, disgusted by the fact they were trailing 1-3, they even turned on their own team. As the Iron Bulls attacked the Port goal late in the game, home fans cheered them on, urging them to shoot and score the winning away goal (Port had won 3-0 away in the 1st leg). Here, finally was a team I could support. The team were neither brilliant, nor relegation-bound, but frustratingly middle of the road, and the fans were cheerfully miserable about their team and the performances they were put through.
My reluctance to support a government entity meant I was still reluctant (I went to a couple of Khon Kaen’s early season away games in Bangkok). However, resistance was futile. I’d changed employer, and found myself getting off the bus outside the Port club shop on my way to work each morning. They were now officially my ‘local’ team. I’d also met a couple of Port fans, Andy and Alex, through the Thai Football forum, and had accompanied them on a couple of away trips, and more than a few home games. It was when they pointed out that I was referring to Port as “we” in a post-match discussion, that I finally succumbed, and bought a season ticket and the accompanying shirt and scarf combo.
Typically, throwing my lot in with Port led to things going bad quickly. Four of their best players, and (incredibly) the coach were sold to Buriram for a reported 20 million baht in the mid-season transfer window. The gossip was that this was to give the PAT some financial muscle, as their relationship with the club’s new benefactor and aspiring Peua Thai politician, known as “Big Ben”, was deteriorating. Despite all this money floating around, the players went months without being paid. Big Ben named himself in the squad for the second half of the season, and made at least one appearance in the League Cup.
With the guts ripped out of the team, Port were unsurprisingly poor in the latter part of the season, although relegation wouldn’t arrive until the following year. Big Ben lost his election, and disappeared into the sunset, and the players finally got paid. Somehow, the team still made it to the League Cup Final. While I’d been eying up other clubs, I’d missed Port’s triumphs in the FA Cup in 2009 and the League Cup in 2010, so it was fitting that the final I did attend was lost. Nevertheless, I did immensely enjoy being part of the Port motorcade from Klong Toei to Supachalasai Stadium, and the anomaly of watching the 2011 final in February 2012, thanks to some Buriram skulduggery.
Sometime during 2009, I stumbled across the ThaiFootball.com forum, where I found some useful information about games. After initially observing, I posted more often in 2010, as my attendance of matches also increased. Through the forum I was able to meet regular contributors like Greg (Muang Thong), Dale (Chonburi), Vinnie (Nakhon Rachasima) at games, and for the first time in a while, was making friends with more in common than simply language and occupation (EFL teacher). There was a core group of frequent posters on the forum, and as well as some useful information and history, there was plenty of advice for the Football Association of Thailand on how they should be running the game.
Back then, at times, it felt like our fascination with Thai football was akin other peoples’ inability to look away from train wrecks. There were disagreements of course, but these were typically civil. This changed somewhat with the move of 2008 champions PEA from Ayutthaya to Buriram after the 2009 season. The arrival of few Buriram fans to the forum changed the atmosphere, and after a about a year, a new forum was set up by one of the older members, with the intention of moderating more strictly, or simply blocking those known to be repeat offenders. However, by this time, most of the core group on Thai Football had their own sites or blogs, and much of the discussion had moved to Twitter. Both forums petered out very soon after the split.
When I’d returned in 2009, in an attempt to improve my reading skills, I’d started reading Football Siam magazine, which provided me with plenty of information on the local leagues. When I first started buying it, the magazine was published every five days. Fortunately, they changed the publication cycle to weekly not long after. While at 50 or so pages long, it wouldn’t have troubled a Thai reader for more than a couple of hours, it took me about a week’s worth of bus trips to and from work to slog through it, so I was glad to get the extra two days.
Nigel, who’d started the ThaiLeagueFootball.com site to provide English-language match information, picked up that on the forum, I was posting information from Thai-language articles, and asked me to contribute news articles to his site. We met for a drink to discuss this. The upshot was that I was too busy to do full articles, but he had a TLF twitter account that he rarely used, and I agreed to use this to post news.
In early 2011, I began tweeting headlines in English, mostly using stories published on the Siam Sport and Thai League Online websites. Over the five years I tweeted football news, tweaks to each of these sites meant I would stop using one or the other, depending on how user-friendly I found the changes. Most nights I would spend about two hours skim reading stories and tweeting a brief headline for each, starting with the TPL, then Division 1, and finally, the five (later 6) Regional Leagues, adding in National Team news when relevant. Because I included the links to the original stories as a reference, I generally had about 120 characters to work with. I also took over maintaining the fixture lists and tables on the site – a challenging task given Thai football’s love of a last-minute fixture change.
Initially, the TLF team I joined was Nigel, and his Thai colleague, Sasi, with Nigel and I providing all of the content. A year or so before I joined, Nigel and Sasi had negotiated a deal with the TPL, and provided English translations of news stories for the official TPL site. However, this had fizzled out after a few months, with the person at the TPL end seemingly losing interest. Nigel & Sasi had also registered TLF as a company, and in 2011 we applied and for an obtained media passes from the TPL/FAT. Nigel arranged meetings with the FAT, again offering to provide translations or weekly previews and reviews for the English pages of the official TPL site. They initially agreed on a fee of about 10000 baht/month, but each time Nigel went to a meeting to finalise the agreement, the person he was supposed to meet failed to show up, and the underlings assigned to Nigel instead were either unwilling or unable to agree to this amount. In the end, we gave up.
During the course of the 2011 season, we added Malky (from bkkfootballblog.blogspot.com), Joseph and Lily to the team. Malky wrote weekly previews and reviews of the weekend’s games, as well as match reports from games he attended. Joseph and Lily provided us with professional match photos. Finally, Matt was added to the team to seek out marketing opportunities, as we sought to gain a little reward from our efforts. Joseph had a website-designing contact, Tony, who provided us with an updated, modern-looking website for the 2012 season.
When I’d returned in 2009, in an attempt to improve my reading skills, I’d started reading Football Siam magazine, which provided me with plenty of information on the local leagues. When I first started buying it, the magazine was published every five days. Fortunately, they changed the publication cycle to weekly not long after. While at 50 or so pages long, it wouldn’t have troubled a Thai reader for more than a couple of hours, it took me about a week’s worth of bus trips to and from work to slog through it, so I was glad to get the extra two days.
Nigel, who’d started the ThaiLeagueFootball.com site to provide English-language match information, picked up that on the forum, I was posting information from Thai-language articles, and asked me to contribute news articles to his site. We met for a drink to discuss this. The upshot was that I was too busy to do full articles, but he had a TLF twitter account that he rarely used, and I agreed to use this to post news.
In early 2011, I began tweeting headlines in English, mostly using stories published on the Siam Sport and Thai League Online websites. Over the five years I tweeted football news, tweaks to each of these sites meant I would stop using one or the other, depending on how user-friendly I found the changes. Most nights I would spend about two hours skim reading stories and tweeting a brief headline for each, starting with the TPL, then Division 1, and finally, the five (later 6) Regional Leagues, adding in National Team news when relevant. Because I included the links to the original stories as a reference, I generally had about 120 characters to work with. I also took over maintaining the fixture lists and tables on the site – a challenging task given Thai football’s love of a last-minute fixture change.
Initially, the TLF team I joined was Nigel, and his Thai colleague, Sasi, with Nigel and I providing all of the content. A year or so before I joined, Nigel and Sasi had negotiated a deal with the TPL, and provided English translations of news stories for the official TPL site. However, this had fizzled out after a few months, with the person at the TPL end seemingly losing interest. Nigel & Sasi had also registered TLF as a company, and in 2011 we applied and for an obtained media passes from the TPL/FAT. Nigel arranged meetings with the FAT, again offering to provide translations or weekly previews and reviews for the English pages of the official TPL site. They initially agreed on a fee of about 10000 baht/month, but each time Nigel went to a meeting to finalise the agreement, the person he was supposed to meet failed to show up, and the underlings assigned to Nigel instead were either unwilling or unable to agree to this amount. In the end, we gave up.
During the course of the 2011 season, we added Malky (from bkkfootballblog.blogspot.com), Joseph and Lily to the team. Malky wrote weekly previews and reviews of the weekend’s games, as well as match reports from games he attended. Joseph and Lily provided us with professional match photos. Finally, Matt was added to the team to seek out marketing opportunities, as we sought to gain a little reward from our efforts. Joseph had a website-designing contact, Tony, who provided us with an updated, modern-looking website for the 2012 season.
From my perspective, the best feature was a widget Tony added, which allowed me to input fixtures faster. I could set teams with a default home ground and kick-off time (which was aided by the TPL introducing minimum floodlight requirements) so almost all match information loaded once the home team was selected. I still had to input every fixture using dropdown menus, but it was much easier to make adjustments when needed during the season. The tables also updated automatically, once I entered the results. On the previously platform, all of this was a manual operation. Not long after our first meeting as a full group, I moved back to Korea, meaning my involvement with group was minimal, and I mostly focused on providing content.
Nigel was keen to have a “community” feel to the site, and encouraged readers to send us their articles and stories. This led to us having regular match reports from Paul (now writing for ESPN), Andy, and Brian, amongst others. Matt spent the best part of 18 months trying to find sponsorship for the site, as well as recruiting some of these writers. Many of his appointments had a similar pattern to those of Nigel’s FAT meetings; a 1 or 2 hour drive through Bangkok traffic, only to arrive and find that “Khun X is not here right now”.
He got close to a small deal with AIG Insurance (who’d done a deal that saw them covering most TPL teams), only for the manager who’d agree to the deal to move back to Europe before anything was signed. The only success Matt had was a short-lived deal with Futera, who were keen to market their on- and offline football cards in Thailand. Futera went on to take over a Regional League (Bangkok) club, and experiment with an online, fan-managed system for their team, Futera Seeker FC.
Somewhere along the line, Nigel stepped away over disagreements with how Matt and Joseph were making decisions regarding the site. Partway through 2013, Matt left the group to take on a similar, but salaried, role with Suphanburi FC. Joseph’s involvement also waned. Not a huge football fan, he’d mostly done photoshoots with players, that had been organised by Matt. Lily was still posting photos from Port games she attended regularly, but by the end of 2013, it was only Malky and I producing content on the site. In addition to the fixtures and tweets, I’d written histories/profiles of around 50 clubs, covering all TPL and Division 1 clubs (at that time), and around 15 Regional League clubs. I was also contributing guest articles to Dale’s Chonburi site, and the Asian Football Feast site.
Not long after I’d moved back to New Zealand in 2014, Nigel got back in contact with Malky and me, saying he was again taking over the running of the site (it seems his name was still on the domain name), but to avoid any potential conflict with Joseph and Tony, was moving back to the original Readyplanet platform, from Wordpress that we’d used since 2012. As this meant I would be again manually doing tables and fixtures, I advised him that due to family and work commitments, I would only be able to continue running the Twitter account. Malky provided reports for about another half season, before deciding he’d had enough, winding up his blog in the process. Nigel kept the site and Facebook page updated, and occasionally tweeted, while I covered news and results for the next two seasons, before deciding at the beginning of 2016 that I was no longer able to give so much time to the site.
It was a tough decision, as the Twitter account had about 22,000 followers at the time (a fact that amuses my friends, given my refusal to upgrade to a smartphone, and my dislike of using other social media sites). In some ways, I felt I was letting those followers down, although a number of similar accounts and sites were starting up around that time, and I realised I wasn’t so irreplaceable. In the couple of years since, the TLF site has disappeared, and Nigel has changed the Twitter handle to encompass general events in Thailand, which sadly means much of our work has disappeared, as have the discussions of the earlier, and now-defunct, forums.
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