WritingProduct
FootyLens is live: every West Ham fixture in one place
Fixtures, results, tables and the stats that actually tell you something — built by people who watch the games, and fast enough to check at half time.
FootyLens is out. It does one thing: it follows West Ham properly.
Fixtures, results, the table, and the numbers that tell you something about a match rather than the ones that fill a graphic. It loads in under a second on a bad connection in a stadium concourse, which is the only performance benchmark that has ever mattered to us.
Why this exists
We have run The Bobby Moore Stand for years. Every week that meant assembling the same picture from four different places: one site for the fixture, another for the team news, a third for the stats, and a fourth that had the thing we wanted behind a video autoplaying an advert.
None of those sites is bad. They are just all built for every club at once, which means none of them is built for one. Following a single team well turns out to be a different product from following a league.
What's in it
- Fixtures and results, with kick-off times in your own timezone.
- The table, updated live, without a page that reloads and loses your place.
- Match stats chosen because they explain something. Expected goals, yes. Possession as a headline number, no — it has never once told you who deserved to win.
- Squad and availability, so you can see who is actually fit.
It is on the web now, with iOS and Android to follow.
What's not in it
No push notification asking you to come back. No feed algorithm. No account required to look at a fixture list.
There is no comment section either, and that is deliberate rather than temporary. Match-day comments need moderation to stay usable, we cannot moderate them properly at this size, and an unmoderated one would end up representing the club worse than saying nothing.
What's next
More history, better pre-match context, and the two APIs that already power all of this opening up for other people to build on — the News API and the Data API.
If something is wrong, missing, or slower than it should be, tell us. We watch the same games you do and we will notice, but you will notice first.
- footylens
- launch
Newsletter
One email a month, and only when there is something worth saying.
New releases, honest write-ups of what we got wrong, and early access when we have it to give. Or take the RSS feed instead.