The Real FA Cup
A website which seeks to promote non league football, particularly in the early stages of the FA Cup
In August 2008, I visited my local football club – Dulwich Hamlet – with a friend, for an FA Cup Preliminary Round match.
Whilst at the game, we reminisced about a feature that Match Of The Day once did in which they chose a non league team at the start of the competition and followed them through to the final, switching to the victorious team if their team was beaten.
The game finished as a draw so, on the following Tuesday night, we went to the replay – at Broxbourne Borough – and a new venture was born.
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I created a website for us to write about our exploits and, after much deliberation, we decided to call it The Real FA Cup.
Several years later, we now have more than 8,000 followers on Twitter and hundreds of “Like”s on Facebook and regularly get a large amount of traffic. I’ve redesigned the site a few times, each time an improvement on the last and now it is very simply laid out and shows our content in a very straight forward and concise way.
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Match Reports And Articles
We regularly invite our followers to contribute articles and have also recorded a podcast once or twice.
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Live Scores
The site also features a live-updating scores service which uses Twitter to obtain latest scores in matches which aren’t covered by the national media.
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Teletext Theme
Written by me using Django and Twitter Bootstrap and hosted on Heroku, the app updates scores in real time as well as tweeting them. In a fit of nostalgia one day, I also added a new theme for the page which reflects the Ceefax football scores pages from days gone by, which I am particularly proud of, in a really geeky way.
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Results
These days, the scores page gets more hits than any other part of our website and this is the only section of the site for which we have considered adding sponsorship. However, until now, we have decided that the ethos of the site is not to make money but to promote non league football.
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