"Way back when I started, women in football journalism at all were very rare. I had a lot of difficult, awkward conversations."
Editor of Football365 Sarah Winterburn, celebrating her impressive 25th year at the renowned football media title, reflects on her illustrious career, noting the industry's evolution and her role as one of the first women in football journalism. Sarah discusses the impact of money in football, the shift in fan culture, and how Football365 traverses the societal issues in what she deems “the ludicrous game”.
Sarah, 25 years at Football365. How do you feel about achieving a remarkable work milestone that very few other people achieve these days?
It’s flown by. it doesn't feel like 25 years. It's been almost all my working career, and that is incredibly unusual. It's particularly unusual in this industry, but unusual in general. It's like something from the Victorian times.
I've done 25 years in three different cities, working in seven or eight different offices under various management styles, so it's never been the same. It's always been a little bit different; it’s always been evolving, and I've never got bored. 25 years never got bored. It's not bad, is it?
I think I've read somewhere that you were one of the first women in football journalism, is that true?
Oh, very much so. Way back when I started, women in football journalism at all were very rare. I had a lot of difficult, awkward conversations - we're talking nearly 30 years ago. I don't know of any other woman who's edited a football website for 10 minutes, never mind 25 years. So, it's quite an achievement, I think, and hopefully a few people see it and think that they can do it too.
"I've never called it the beautiful game because I think it's an absolutely ludicrous game. It's a ridiculous sport; people running around after a ball of air trying to put it in the net, it’s ridiculous."
So aside from TEAMtalk’s James Marshment, who's pipped you to the quarter century post by a single year, you might well be the longest serving incumbent of football media. What moments really stand out to you from your illustrious career at Football365?
The good moments, we've won awards, they've been great. We've always worked in this ‘small’ way. We've always had a small team and yet we go head-to-head with some of the biggest: The BBC, The Guardian and people like ESPN, who’ve had loads of money thrown at them. We've always been small, yet always boxed above our weight. So, when we've won awards, or won any kind of recognition from outside, that's always been brilliant.
Then there's the other things: people who've called me up very annoyed about what we said -around hour long conversations with Robbie Savage, for example, which was great fun. I've had various newspaper journalists ring me up annoyed. I think we're doing something right if we're annoying people, to be honest.
Frustrated Football fans these days love to say that the game is gone. What do you think has changed in the beautiful game in the time that you've been at Football365, and is it still deserving of that moniker we give it?
"There has been a big shift there, which has created an environment where fans don’t feel as connected to the game, and particularly to the club, as they used to do."
I've never called it the beautiful game because I think it's an absolutely ludicrous game. It's a ridiculous sport; people running around after a ball of air trying to put it in the net, it’s ridiculous. The thing about football, so little of it is about what happens on the pitch anyway. It's everything else around it, all the narratives, and all things that have changed.
I had a look at who won the Premier League when I first started and Man United were winning it, but do you know who else was up there? Leeds United! No sign of Man City, because they didn't have any money yet.
I think the biggest change is the amount of money that's coming to the Premier League, it’s crazy.
25 years ago, when I started, almost every Premier League club would have been owned by an English person, possibly the local grocer- no, not to that extent, but you know what I mean. Now 25 years later, we've got nation states owning football clubs, and the amount of money in the game is ludicrous.
There has been a big shift there, which has created an environment where fans don’t feel as connected to the game, and particularly to the club, as they used to do. That's been a big change and it’s not a great change. There's a big disconnect now between fans and the sport, but we [Football365] are here to discuss all those things and give fans a place they can vent.
We've always had this interaction within the site, and the things that people have complained about over the years or have wanted to shout about have changed. A lot of time now it’s about the money, or VAR - that was a massive thing to come in and change the landscape. The idea that football is exactly the same game whatever level you were playing at; you could play in the park on a Sunday, that was the same game that you would see in the Premier League on a Saturday - now that's no longer the case.
We've got this technology which has made it very different. It was supposed to end the endless debate about the decisions, it’s made it far worse. We're annoyed now about the little man in the studio somewhere, rather than the man in the middle.
There have been lots of changes, not all of them for the good, but the standard of the football has improved massively. I’m thinking back to the 90s or the early 2000s, if you look at the videos of that now, yeah, there is some beautiful football in there, but there's also a lot of clogging, and now there isn't a lot of that.
We are blessed in this country with having this amazing standard of football and like I said, maybe that does create a bit of a disconnect sometimes, because it doesn't really feel like those clubs belong to the fans, but it creates this wonderful spectacle, and Football365 is all about that.
Aside from the money and rule changes, is there anything else you’ve spotted that has made a substantial difference?
Social media and the internet have made a huge difference. When I started for Football365, people were barely only starting to use emails, that's how long ago we're talking. The internet was this place that people didn't really understand.
When I took the job in the first place, I had a lot of people saying to me, what on earth are you doing? “This is a fad, it's not going to catch on.” People who worked in newspapers looked down on anybody, very snobbishly, who worked on the internet. The joke’s on them now, because newspapers are almost dead.
"Everybody can see everything all the time, everybody has an opinion, everybody can be a pundit, so the line between fans and the media is more blurred than it ever was"
This explosion of social media has entirely changed fan culture and the way that fans can react to football. That quick dissemination of statistics, videos, opinions, everything is right there at your fingertips now, and it's really changed football, because it's happening in real time, all the time.
There's no point talking about what happened yesterday, because it's already been discussed. It's made everything so fast paced and made those of us who write content have to change the way that we do it. Finding new ways to cover football is how that's changed.
Social media has democratised football coverage. Anyone can cover it, record it and it's up there immediately. Does that take the excitement out of it?
It's a different kind of excitement. It means that we have to find different ways of doing things. When everyone's got every goal, opinion and statistic in their hands, you have to offer something different. That’s why a lot of what we do is longer analysis, looking at things in more detail; not a 22 second TikTok video or something you're going to see on X.
Yes, we need to get into those markets as well, but we've also got to offer something that you can't get from those. Everybody can see everything all the time, everybody has an opinion, everybody can be a pundit, so the line between fans and the media is more blurred than it ever was, which makes it a bit tricky when you're on this side of the line.
"We used to be massively known for being irreverent. As the years have gone by, we've had to tone that down so much."
You know the sports publishing industry inside out, how different is it to when you started your career?
20 to 25 years ago you had no information. You didn't know how many people were looking at anything, you didn't have traffic numbers, you certainly didn't know where they were coming from, no one had heard of SEO. This is how it was: you wrote some words, they went on a page, and then some people might look at it, and some people might not, you never knew how many, as long as you got paid, you thought enough people must!
Fast forward a couple of decades, you've got so much information. You know exactly where every single person is coming from, you know their age, what their habits are, what their hobbies are, how long they’re staying on the page, how long you want them to stay on the page; it's so much information. The data around publishing is so great that we're no longer working in this blind spot of just doing our own thing.
It sometimes does take the magic out of it, because you've got to think about who's reading and not just writing about what you want to write, what you find interesting. It's finding that middle ground between what we want to do and what will get people reading.
Sarah Winterburn pictured as Football365 wins FSF Online Media of the Year award in 2017.
How has Football365’s tone changed over the years?
We used to be massively known for being irreverent. As the years have gone by, we've had to tone that down so much. What we were writing 20 years ago compared to what we're writing now is quite different. We are very aware that we're far more visible than we ever were then.
Years ago, you could pretty much do what you wanted. The internet was a wild west, and nobody really cared whether you swore or kind of half-libelled somebody. It was all a little bit crazy.
We've had to tone it down, and so has everyone else, because advertisers don't want swearing on the page, they obviously don't want to be sued by anybody. I wouldn't describe us as irreverent anymore.
I'd say we are opinionated, and we can be controversial, but not in a way that pushes too many boundaries. I find that a little bit sad. We used to just do what we wanted, but I realise that's not very grown up and mature!
"Not everything can be condensed down to a 22 second TikTok video."
It can be difficult for legacy brands to adapt to new ways, but Football365 has embraced the challenges with open arms. What has Football365 done to stay relevant in a competitive market and what does the future hold for the much-loved title?
We still do everything that made us good in the first place, that’s the key. We look for innovation, but there are certain things that we've always done, and we will always do. If you can ever look at a piece of content and think nobody else would do that, that's when you're doing something right.
There are things that we write that nobody else is doing because they're about social issues. We've always been at the forefront of talking about racism within the media, we've always been at the forefront of homophobia, of any kind of sports laundering or sports washing. We've always been at the centre of that, we've always been talking about it, and I think that people come to us for that reason.
"We get a lot of abuse for it. We get emails all the time saying we're the ‘wokerati’ or ‘snowflakes’. I'll take that as a compliment, thanks."
We've also always had a mailbox, which is 20 odd years of fans writing in. It's a very old-fashioned letters page, but it's still standing decades later, for a reason, because it’s that unadulterated interaction with fans. We still do Media Watch; we do 16 conclusions on every big game, and if people know that that's there, then they will come for that regardless.
Football media has evolved so that we're trying to get people in from here, there and everywhere, all the time, from aggregators, from Google, from social media. The real key is keeping people who come for very specific things. Say it's the day after Man United v Liverpool, I know who will have 16 conclusions, I know who will have Premier League winners and losers, I know who will have two mailboxes on the game. So, it's that certainty that people will end up coming for the same thing.
That's not to say you stand still, but it does mean that you have that consistency, that people keep coming back to. Everything that I've talked about is as relevant now as it was 20 years ago, that stuff doesn't change. People still want to talk about the same things, and people still want to read at length about events on the pitch and off the pitch. Not everything can be condensed down to a 22 second TikTok video.
I am a bit of an old woman about this stuff, because I am an old woman, but I think there is room for that and there always has been room. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, which is really a key to success: don't ever throw everything that's worked out the window in pursuit of something new, you can do both.
How prevalent are those societal issues in the game today? How does Football365 critique those issues and concentrate on what happens off the pitch as much as on it?
We’ve always held the football media to account. They have a lot of sway, a lot of power. If you're a part of the mainstream media, you can create a narrative around something which is not always very healthy, at all.
A big part of that has been the way that the media has portrayed black players in a different way to white players and they've always done it. They've always portrayed them as spending too much money, being surrounded by women, dressing the wrong way.
There are examples throughout the last couple of decades of how you treat literally the same story differently between a black player and a white player and we have always highlighted this. We've always held people to account, particularly with a player like Raheem Sterling, who was a massive victim of all this kind of treatment, we've always put our head above the parapet and said, ‘wait a minute this is not right’ and detailed exactly why.
We get a lot of abuse for it. We get emails all the time saying we're the ‘wokerati’ or ‘snowflakes’. I'll take that as a compliment, thanks. If we have our hands up saying, this is not right, this is wrong, then I'm quite happy to do that, all day every day, despite threatening emails or nonsense from right-wing people, who want to make out that we're some sort of weird little livid liberals, just because we think that everybody should be treated the same.
What advice can you give to people just starting their careers in football media?
The industry has changed massively in the time that I've been in it, that now it's really tricky for young people to get into it. I would say, like everybody else says on this question: do it before you get paid for it, because that's the only way.
If you want to write about football, if you want to make videos about football, then you should already be writing about football and you should already be making videos about football.
When it comes to covering England, you don't want them to be any good at all, but you do want them to win. So, every game was phenomenal, because they were terrible, awful, horrendous, putrid, and yet, they got over the line.
That doesn't mean going and doing lots of work for nothing, though there might be an element of that, but you don't need to wait to get the job to get started. This is the wonderful thing about modern media, on social media you don't have to wait to be paid to do something. Start doing it, start writing about it and find a niche.
I get lots of emails from people looking for work. The only thing that stands out is when people go, I've already done this and this, or I've got a real interest in this particular thing.
There are thousands of people who are out there writing about Premier League football and there’s thousands more making statistical videos about Premier League football. How do you stand out? There's got to be something different. You've all already got to be doing it, or you've already got to have a niche that you know more about than anybody else. It's such a tricky business to get into now, but it's a brilliant business, because football is phenomenal.
What is a standout moment from your 25-year long career?
Major tournaments are always mad, but quite recently, the European Championships in 2024 must have gone the most perfect way any tournament could go for us.
When it comes to covering England, you don't want them to be any good at all, but you do want them to win. So, every game was phenomenal, because they were terrible, awful, horrendous, putrid, and yet, they got over the line.
It was almost comical the way that everything kept falling into our path, because the best thing about England is people moaning about England, and people having opinions about England, and people clamouring for Jack Grealish or James Maddison, or whoever’s not there to be there, or saying Cole Palmer should be signed, or all the moaning about Gareth Southgate. Because of that we had phenomenal traffic, because people would want to read about how bad this England side was.
But we didn't want them to be so bad that they would go out, because that would be a disaster. It couldn't possibly have gone any better than them being so bad and yet getting into the final, it was like you had written it! If you'd have asked me, what's your dream scenario for this European Championship? I would have written it exactly like that, England have got to be awful, terrible, rotten, but just good enough to get to the final and then just be awful, terrible, rotten again in the final!
It is a bit sad; you are supporting them. That's the weird thing about this job, you end up being more invested in the narrative than you do in the actual football. That was a real high, I couldn't have written it any better!
Who do you support?
I support Huddersfield Town, the mighty Huddersfield Town!