The project was supposed to be about football. It became about journalism.
That was not the plan. The plan was to write about matches and players and tournaments. The plan was to develop a voice that could later become a portfolio for a journalism school application. The plan was professional in the conventional sense.
What happened instead was that the writing kept circling back to the conditions under which football gets covered, rather than the football itself. The press critiques became more frequent than I intended. The structural pieces about coverage outweighed the tactical pieces about play. The blog drifted away from being a football blog and toward being a blog about how football is reported.
This was not bad. It was just not the original idea.
The reason it happened, I think, is that I do not need this blog to write about matches. I can watch a match and know what I think about it. I do not need to publish what I think about it. The pieces that demanded to be written were the ones the existing press was not writing. The structural pieces. The North African vantage point pieces. The language pieces. The interpreter problem.
Those pieces felt necessary. The match reports felt optional.
If I do this again, or if I extend this into a second year, I will write what is not being written. I will let the conventional coverage go. The blog will be smaller, sharper, and less complete. It will also be more useful.
A year of this taught me that the gap I noticed when I started is bigger than I thought. There is more to write. The European press is not closing the gap. Somebody has to.