The Final Frontier

Even space doesn't go on forever.

Hi everyone,

And I do mean everyone. My god, there are a lot of you now. When I launched space space space last August, I remember being thrilled that the first letter found a couple hundred readers, and a few of you even liked it enough to type your email addresses into a sketchy homemade website for more. You didn’t know at the time what I might send you — hell, not even I knew what I might send you — but you were hungry enough for a different kind of soccer writing to give it a shot.

Have the letters since then been what you expected? I hope not. If there are any kind of rules for this project I’m pretty sure one of them was never to live up to expectations. Sameness stifles sportswriting. I’ve written letters about data and tactics and, uh, seagulls; about players and coaches and abstractions; about the historical evolution of passing behavior across Europe and about a single gorgeous throughball from Florian Neuhaus; about competing theories of soccer from Andrea Pirlo and from shitty AI bots that could barely complete a pass. One time I used data to define the playing style of every club in the top five leagues via dimension reduction and clustering; another time I used it to create a dumb online personality quiz to find your midfield personality type. I wrote a multi-part manifesto about buildup tactics. I wrote a heist movie about Tottenham. I wrote so goddamn much about everything, and it still never felt like enough.

There’s just way too much soccer. I don’t mean that as a fan. As a fan it’s amazing that I can open my laptop at pretty much any time of any day and stream a live game happening somewhere on the planet. Growing up in Texas not all that long ago, I remember being impressed that one of my friends’ rich parents had a super deluxe cable package that let him watch the team he liked, Bayern Munich, in something called the Champions League. I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded impossibly esoteric.

As somebody trying to cover the best of the world game in A.D. 2021, though, there’s a lot of soccer and a whole lot of world to cover. Even though I mostly stuck to where the money is, at the top of a handful of European leagues, I still felt overwhelmed by how many games I was trying to analyze every week, how many storylines I had to keep tabs on, how hard it was to come up with an original and interesting idea for an article that a hundred other journalists wouldn’t get to first.

One way I learned to cope was to learn to code. Being able to take a step back and look at a lot of matches at once gave me a different perspective on the sport, one that felt less trampled by the neverending tabloid news cycle. I tried to use data to tell the kind of stories I was most curious about, looking beyond the day-to-day to get at how soccer really works. I wanted to write stuff you couldn’t read anywhere else.

Or almost anywhere else. As it turned out, some of the work that felt most similar to my tiny little subscription newsletter was coming from the biggest sub-driven sports site around, The Athletic UK. A guy I’d known from analytics Twitter for years, Tom Worville, had landed a staff writing job there and was using it to bring soccer nerdery to the masses. As his colleague Michael Cox, whose own tactics writing is some of the most heavily cited stuff in space space space’s links, told me about his collabs with Worville, “I think he’s great at making in-depth stats make sense to people who don’t necessarily love stats.”

Anyway, yeah, you’ve probably guessed where this is going. Not long ago The Athletic UK reached out to me. Tom was leaving to become a data scientist for some energy drink company. Would I be interested in having a chat?

When I notified paid subscribers a couple weeks ago that space space space would be headed to the bench so I could start a new mystery job, I said a couple things I still mean. One was that writing this newsletter has been the best job I’ve ever had. Another was that there are very few opportunities I would have left it for. Like I told my girlfriend, Tom’s gig as an analytics writer for a subscription-driven site that loves longform might be the only job on Earth that would give me a salary and benefits to do the soccer nerd stuff I love, and do it for hundreds of thousands of readers right at the beating heart of the soccer — sorry, football — world.

Even better, I won’t have to do it alone. It’s hard to remember what journalism looked like back when anybody could afford to staff a newsroom, but this business has always worked best as a team sport. Readers who’ve loved the recent wave of soccer newsletters but couldn’t pay a bunch of individual writers what we had to charge each month to survive have not-so-jokingly been bugging us to band together and start a magazine or something. Well, The Athletic UK is basically that, except that in addition to nerd stuff you also get some of the best beat reporters in the English language covering dozens of clubs around Europe. Used to be when I would start researching a newsletter, the first thing I would do was google what The Athletic UK had already done on the subject and pull the juiciest quotes from their reporting to get my analytical juices flowing. Now I’ll be working side by side with the people who wrote those stories, collaborating to produce even bigger and better ones. I’ve only been in the Slack for like nine hours and I’m already buzzing with new article ideas.

This is a sales pitch, yes, but it’s not one I had to make. They’re not offering me anything to bring my audience with me. In fact, I had to bug corporate to come up with some kind of promo deal so space space space readers who don’t already subscribe to The Athletic UK could check it out. I did it because I like you — you gave me the best job I ever had, remember? — and I think you’ll really like the stuff we do.

If you would like to become an Athletic subscriber for free for three months, use this promo link. That one is just for space space space members. If you’re committed for the long haul and would prefer to get 33% off your first year, use this other promo link instead. That’s the one I’m supposed to blast on social media. Why are there two different deals? Don’t ask me, I’m the guy who could never even get his newsletter coupons to work the way they were supposed to.

While we’re on the subject of money: Paid subscribers, I promised you I would refund any subscription fees for months I won’t be writing space space space, and I will. Unfortunately I don’t use Substack, which can send out prorated refunds to everybody with a single click. So if I owe you money, please email me at john@spacespacespaceletter.com to let me know and I will go find your Stripe account and manually click “refund” as many times as it takes. This is what I get for going indie.

Oh, speaking of space space space's wonderful paid subscribers, they’ve graciously agreed to make the entire archive free to any members who would like to read old letters. I know a lot of people wanted to become paid subscribers but couldn't at the time. Now you don't have to, and I hope a lot of those letters are still worth reading. Dig in!

I guess that’s pretty much it. I’ll probably still send out an email now and then, but about what I don’t know. I still want to publish a bunch of tidbits from interviews I’ve done that didn’t make it into newsletters yet, including a possession value thing I’ve been working on. We’ll see if that’s kosher with the new bosses. I may do an occasional roundup of stuff I’ve written so you can keep tabs even if you don’t wind up subscribing to The Athletic UK. Maybe one day I’ll use this email list to announce a book project or something (btw if you’re an editor at one of those publishing houses that drop seven-figure advances on debut writers, hit me up).

It’s been fun. Thank you so much for reading.

John ❧

Image: dribnet, The loneliness of space