BarcaFutbol: Some changes

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Over the past few years, we have thoroughly enjoyed building this small non-profitable and loss-making newsletter with all of you. We did it because we are football crazy and we love writing.

But while we have enjoyed the writing, the best part of building this has been you. The numerous new connections we have made over a shared interest. People who have supported us and encouraged us. It's been quite amazing.

We have also learnt a ton of things in the process. Like the fact that we suck in so many things. But nonetheless, we have enjoyed being part of the community of Barca fans on X and building this. We have also had small successes here and there and so we want to double down.

We are thereby making a few changes.

Platform: We are moving the entire infrastructure to Ghost from a purely bootstrapped home made set up. I enjoy tinkering with stuff but our subscribers are growing albeit very slowly and we need more robust solutions.

Hopefully, the reading experience will be better for everyone. There will be some teething challenges. Some emails will end up in spam and so on, but slowly it will become better

Domain: We are moving the domain to www.barcafutbol.com

Content Coverage: We are expanding significantly what we create as content

Going forward we will be extending our coverage of this newsletter across the following:

• Regular match reviews after every match
• Match previews before select La Liga games and CL games
• Tactical analysis of games, coaches, caching formations and players (this can be beyond FC Barcelona at times)
• Player scouting reports
• Player profiling reports
• LaMasia reports
• A weekly podcast on all things Barca
• A weekly video cast on tactical principles of the game
• Live match review sessions immediately after every Barca game on livestream

Public Roadmap : Link

• We have decided to build in the open and thereby share our public roadmap
• It includes among many other things the following:
• Creating a mobile app (iOS and Android)
• Creating a custom LLM / agent on all publicly available Barca data from 1990 onwards. We wil mostly use Vertex AI and a combination of HuggingFace and Anthropic to build it.
• Creating very detailed scout reports which are interactive as mobile and web experiences
• An aggeragator feed/ app, recommendation engine for all Barca news and social signals highlighting the most influential voices in the Barca fan community

Content Themes

We feel its time to evolve our content. Going forward we will create a lot more content around

• Match Reviews
• Match Previews
• Player Scouting
• Player profiling
• Opinion pieces
• Coaching analysis
• Barca Gossip
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Player comparison reports
• Live coverage

Pricing:

Until now we have firmly bootstrapped this project on our own. What we used to create will continue to remain free like it was, but for some of the new stuff we will introduce a nominal pricing to pay for the infrastructure around live streaming, emailing, app builds and so on.

We used to publish 4 articles a month. This will stay free. But we will expand our coverage to maybe 10-12 articles a month and 15-20% of this additional content will be priced.

As part of this change, many of you will find an article on Hansi Flick we have posted today. It will be behind a paywall. This article will be for those who sign up as paid subscribers today. This is a test for us and I hope some of you support us in this. We will only post selective content pieces behind a paywall going forward.

We understand that many of you won't be ok with paid tiers and that's completely fine. We will continue to have the majority of our articles free, for all of you, but we do need to try and recover some of the additional expenses we are incurring from the work we are doing. I hope you all understand.

If we had enough advertisers we would have kept all of it free, but for a small newsletter that no one knows about getting advertisers is very hard. So we are doing what we can to adjust for the present. Our goal is to fund the entire thing through advertising and partnerships.

Subscription isn't our preferred model but for now, we will be testing it to see how it goes.

In conclusion:

We are excited about these small changes. These will bring some teething challenges as well, but we are confident we can solve for them and keep moving forward.

Keep building in the open.

Once again thank you for all your support, all your patronage and all your encouragement.

Visca el Barça

Dev & Dom