I didn't imagine my first post on this blog to need a title that looks like it was taken out of a 13 year old girl's text message, but oh well.
A lot of people seem to have been caught off guard with John's announcement mention of the Juventus Offside moving to SB Nation so I thought I'd clear the air. Here's the spiel peeps:
1. The entire Offside blog community is moving to SBNation.com
It's true. SBNation.com bought The Offside as well as the FanTake network a few months ago. When you create a kick-ass website that has a great following, you start attracting interest from the big guns. So what is SBNation.com? It's just a place where a lot of fan-driven sports blogs are hosted, featuring great writers and a tight-knit community for each team. Sound familiar?
2. Every blog will have its own dedicated URL under the umbrella of SBNation.
The URL has already been picked and registered, so once everything is moved over to SBNation, all you'll need to do is edit your bookmarks with the updated URL. The same content, writers, and most importantly readers, will be waiting for you there every morning. The cappuccino will look a bit different but it will still taste the same.
3. THIS BLOG IS ONLY GOING TO GET BETTER
Nope, I'm not a salesmen nor am I trying to sell you something here. While we're all very used to the layout of The Offside and the Disqus commenting system, the SBNation.com platform was actually built from scratch to specifically accommodate crazy & fanatic fans (this must sound familiar). TIME magazine, for what it's worth, named SBNation.com one of the top 50 websites for 2011. There will be a bit of adjusting to do, sure, but we'll have a lot more features and content on the new blog. Most importantly, the SBNation format allows for live match chats which are well done and are pretty much an ongoing discussion. No more scrolling for disqus comments and refreshing the page every 2 mins to see the newest comments.
Hope that information helps. Neither of us are really sure when the transition is actually going to happen, but it's not like we ain't flexible. We'll rock the start of the season (unless the players strike delays it) here at The Offside, and once we've gotten a facelift on the new site we'll carry on there.
Unfortunately, none of this moving talk is helping Marotta sign the last few players we need to fill the gaps in our squad. Every day I wake up, read a bunch of transfer rumours (Alex wants to go to Juve but doesn't want a loan, it's been so long since Marotta asked about Vargas that Fiorentina forgot we exist, Grosso can't even score a spot on an MLS team, Amauri thinks he can get paid $6 million a year at Parma, etc) and think man, Marotta better step up the last 10 days of this transfer window cuz I can't wait to start writing the Summer Transfers Review piece. Especially with Vidal playing like a beast for the first 45 minutes of his Juventus career.
See how easy that was? Two sentences about actual Juve stuff and we've all long forgotten that the Juve Offside blog is moving. Right? RIGHT?