Overthinking Football 2024/25: A 'Thank You' and a change

We weren’t sure where to start with this, so to avoid undue stress, we resolved not to overthink it and bury the lede.

You might’ve noticed, we’re no longer taking money out of your bank accounts. After four years of crunching numbers and introducing new statistics designed for a (sadly still) very niche game that we all love, we’ve decided to leave on a high and not continue paid subscriptions at Overthinking Football. With new responsibilities (coming in the form of new jobs and new kids) as well as Gordon no longer having South East Asian levels of Premier League coverage, we don’t think we are going to have the time and energy to do paying subscribers justice with the content we create into the new season.

It was a tough decision to create a paid tier in the first place, but last Summer we ultimately decided that call was justified by the amount we were going to do in season. And with at least two articles a week throughout the regular season and projections for every single game, we hope we lived up to it. But we owe everyone who is generous enough to pay us our best content, and since we can no longer in good conscience make that guarantee, it was time to call full-time on this part of the endeavor.

We are very grateful for everything this blog represented to us. What started as a hobby to get through Covid with our sanities intact turned into something a lot more, thanks to the amazing draft community. We were immediately welcomed and empowered to share new ideas, new strategies, and most importantly, new statistics, to this game. Drawing inspiration from the wider sports analytics world, we introduced xFpts, WAR, and Quality Starts. It has been amazing to see the community embrace our work, and we hope our contributions live on.

While we no longer will be putting out a full, weekly blog, we are not going to shutter everything entirely. This Substack will stay live and will still be an outlet whenever we get the itch to write something, so keep those free subscriptions active - some draft content is likely, as we prepare for our leagues. In the short-term, we also plan to continue hosting all the statistics we’ve always generated, but will house them in a google sheet instead. We’ll send a link in a future post. Again, time and energy permitting, we may also house our projections in a similar google sheet as a pet project.

Sadly, however, our accompanying website (ranker.overthinkingfootball.com) will be going dark, and the Draft Ranker with it. Another major impetus to making the blog paid was to enable us to host the site and Ranker without actively losing personal funds. Without that, continuing to put in the time and expense to keep everything running is no longer feasible. We are extremely proud of what we put together, especially the Ranker, which, to our knowledge, was the first such algorithm/app. We are not looking forward to the upcoming draft without that in our back pockets!

We will still be active in the Discord community leagues, and our twitter X profile will live on. Please don’t hesitate to reach out there, here via Substack chat / messages or via our email, overthinkingfootball@gmail.com. Interacting with you all in the community is what drew us to this project, and it’s also what will keep us sticking around.

And with that, we want to say a huge final thank you to those of you who supported us financially last season and to everyone from all of us for your friendship and support over the years.

See you soon,

Andy, Chris, Gordon, and Will

Ps. For anyone that might’ve subscribed with a Season Long sub towards the end of the season, we will be in touch!