A daily dose of football news and opinion (football365.com)

Member Name: mrjoegoodwin

Product:	football365.com
Date:	09/06/09 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Different slant on news, Mediawatch section, The forum

Disadvantages: Lots of adverts, page often crashes for me in Firefox browser

Football365 is, as the name suggests, a football site that provides news, opinions, match reviews and articles every day throughout the week. Taking quite a laid back style of writing, Football365 is a very enjoyable site to read, and is one of a few places that I go every day for a small fix of football news and transfer gossip. It can sometimes feel more like a discussion in the pub with your friends than reading a 'serious' newspaper article, and this is part of the site's charm.

In my opinion, the best section is 'Mediawatch', a daily round up of newspaper articles, comment and opinions that poke fun at many of the daily newspaper columnists from home and abroad, and provides a little bit of insight into how the media works. This section is notable for keeping a very good history of comments from players, managers, chairman and journalists, to be used against them in the future when their viewpoint, position or club inevitably changes. Reading Mediawatch helps to remind readers to take the media with a pinch of salt, and to remember that not every sensational headline is laced with facts, let alone the truth.

The Mailbox section is like a written version of '606' on BBC Radio 5 Live, or the various Talksport phone-in shows, comprising letters and emails from the general public, that range from well thought out pieces about football finance, the greed of players and changing managers mid season, to, well, utter rubbish! But, it reflects the views of the people, and it's always interesting to get viewpoints from across the spectrum, even if you don't agree with them.

Almost legendary to the site is the forum, where chat does not always stay on topic (football), but ranges from just about anything under the sun that can be legally discussed on the internet, to many more things that probably can't! Some of the characters on here are extremely rude and crude...but are also extremely funny, and if you're after some light hearted relief, a few minutes spent on the forum is likely to bring a smile to your face - some of the topics have had me in absolute stitches.

As with many commercial sites, Football365 is littered with adverts, promotional material and links to external websites from the same group of companies that runs this website, and it can be quite distracting when trying to focus on the content at hand. Setting up several bookmarks to the pages that you read most often is a handy way to avoid navigating through the adverts.

Whilst not as professional looking as the BBC, newspaper websites or Sky Sports, Football365 is a refreshing, honest alternative to the usual media cycle, and is worth bookmarking and reading a couple of times during the day for a different take on the big football topics.

Summary: Bookmark it!