Keeping it simple. That’s what A Football Report is all about.

“Football is simple. But the hardest thing is to play football manage a football website in a simple way.” - Johan Cruyff.

Hey everyone, A Football Report editor Eric Beard here.

Before we know it, summer will be here. And believe it or not, summer is when A Football Report turns 2 years old. The site has evolved quite a bit since things kicked off here after the 2009 Confederations Cup, but over that time we’ve also been able to get a feel for the right balance in our coverage of the beautiful game. We’ve experimented, with some things working better than others. Now as we move forward, we want to focus on what we do well, and what allows us to connect with you as part of our football community.

After the World Cup ended, we created three sections for writing-based posts (Philosofooty, Match Centre, and Transfers) and one for videos and football culture-based posts (Cheeky Chip). The process became to reblog every writing-based post onto the main A Football Report page (this one) that would link back to the full story. Though this showed promise early on, doing too much soon proved to create more problems than opportunities. Philosofooty’s posts quickly became the most fun to write, the most satisfying to share, and the most interesting to read. In turn, the other two sections died out as we came to understand that we never wanted to be anything resembling a transfer gossip site.

Giving A Football Report a more personal feel has been at the top of my priorities for months now, so here’s what we’ve decided to do:

Simplify everything. Forget all the different sections, everything well-written is going directly on this page for you to read. However, we are going to keep Cheeky Chip going as that has become a zone for sharing videos, photos, and other random and absurd things happening around the world of football.

We’ll likely write the odd post on a transfer or a match report, but the vast majority of posts showing up on this page will be Philosofooty-esque, which is why I’ve created a new “Philosofooty" tag on the right sidebar. You will still be able to access every piece on philosofooty.afootballreport.com, transfers.afootballreport.com, and matchcentre.afootballreport.com, though nothing new will be showing up on those pages. Everything will be here.

As for the A Football Report podcast, well I’ve taken all of your advice to heart and we’re going to relaunch it in an entirely fresh format. Instead of hour-long podcasts, we are going to have 20-25 minute recordings that focus on specific topics. We won’t try to cover EVERYTHING, which will hopefully allow us to enjoy the recordings more and give each podcast an extra feel of personality. We will also make a massive effort to make each podcast interacting with you. From posing questions on our twitter to creating polls on facebook to taking your emails into considerations, we’re going to ensure that you are able to have your say. The podcast should be back next week. Scintillating stuff.

That’s all there is to say. Keeping it simple will give us more freedom to continue to bring you consistent, quality writing about the game we all love. If you have any questions about anything, don’t hesitate to ask or send a tweet my way. Thanks for all the support, now go on and continue your mental preparation for cuatro clásicos…