Preparing For The Other Football Season...Good Previews/Websites?

[Chief Rum]

Hey all,

Just wondering if anyone here has any suggestions for good sites to go to get previews and news for European soccer, particularly Premiership (although I would like to line a good site up for Spanish and Italian football, too).

I would love to find an online and relatively in-depth preview of the Premiership this season, much like we see with American sports at the beginning of their seasons.

CR

[Critch]

There are a few good UK soccer websites that I use to keep up with the news.

The BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/default.stm) one is pretty good. They've got some previews for the Community Shield and the lower English divisions (which have been confusingly renamed this season so that The First Division is now the Championship, the Second Division is now League One, and the Third Division is now League Two). It's generally good for quick updates throughout the day, but nothing too in-depth.

The Sporting Life (http://www.sportinglife.com/football/news/) website is also good, and it also has sections for some of the other top European Leagues. The Sporting Life is a newspaper that caters to gamblers, so theres normally a slant towards betting. It'll probably not have it's preview up til next week, but if it's like last years it'll be the best. The transfer centre is good for keeping up with player moves, and it's well laid out.

Best daily newspaper coverage is The Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,27,00.html) . Good in-depth articles by some of the best sports journalists in the UK.

Soccernet (http://www.soccernet.com) is still pretty good, though it's not as good as it was a couple of years ago. It now lumps all the non-English news together in it's Europe section instead of having different sections for each league. The weekly articles from the Spanish correspondant (Phillip Ball, who wrote a couple of English language books about the history of Spanish soccer) and the German corrspondent (Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger, who wrote Tor! The History of German Football, which is particularly good if you can find it) are well worth reading.

Soccer Spain (http://www.soccer-spain.com/) is supposed to be pretty good but it doesn't seem to be updated very often. Maybe that's because it's the close season and it'll pick up when the league starts.

Add Livescore (http://www.livescore.com) for the games in progress, SoccerBase (http://www.soccerbase.com) for lineups, and RSSSF (http://www.rsssf.com) for results and stats from about a million different countries, and you should have enough to keep you in touch during the season :)

[Chief Rum]

Thank you, Critch. This should help a lot.

CR

[Scholes]

If you have a Barnes and Noble or another specialty magazine retalier around I would suggest picking up copies of Four Four Two and World Soccer... the season preview edition of Four Four Two is always good, although by the time it gets published and shipped here a lot can happen, with transfers and injuries and the like. Check the web for those. I use soccernet, uefa dot com and the SI Off Topic message boards, I figure most of them are right in the middle of it and know what's going on, so I get a lot of opinions there.

Keep up the good work on the Tamworth dynasty by the way, I've been reading.

[Chief Rum]

Thanks, Scholes. You played well today, BTW. Too bad you had to carry your teammates a bit too much.

CR

[mattwakeman]

www.football365.com is also pretty good.