Tescos are currently selling 8 Everyday Value Chocolate Ices for £0.60. This means that with his £45,000, Rio could buy 75,000 boxes of choc-ices, and 600,000 individual ice-creams – enough to keep Frank Lampard happy until the January transfer window.

Twitter really is a wonderful place!

Two months ago, a good friend of mine sent me a link to this tweet, written by @scotwilliams

The capacity of the Spion KOP is approx 12,340. Meaning followers of @Theanfieldwrap now looks something like this… http://tomdeavellar.com/images/Liverpool_kop.jpg

Now, like many of the people in this story, I’ve never met Scot, but his tweet got me thinking… Is there any way of automating a process to enable football fans to visualize their twitter followers in the context of a football crowd? Scott had taken the time to match up @theanfieldwrap’s followers with an image of the world-famous, Kop, but what if there was a way of doing this automatically, and letting everyone play along too.

I did a quick feasibility study to work out what problems I faced, and quickly realised a couple of things:

1. I had no photos of football grounds and no money to have get any taken.
2. Most people on twitter don’t have 12,340 followers, they have 176. This means that finding photos of tiny grounds was going to be difficult.
3. I had absolutely no idea how to go about creating an application that would perform the functionality I was looking for.

The first problem was solved by the hundreds of photographers on Flickr who are prepared to release their images under the creative commons license. This means that chumps like me, can use their images on our websites, provided that there is the appropriate credit at the bottom. To the many photographers whose photos we have linked to (none of whom I have met) a big THANK YOU.

The second problem was a little more tricky. Finding Flickr images of grounds with capacities of between 1,000 – 100,000 is fairly straightforward, however as I mentioned before, “only 0.05% (of users) have more than 10,000, and only 2.05% have more than 1,000 followers. The vast majority of users – 95.8% – have less than 500 followers”

This meant that instead of using the capacities of grounds, for the lower numbers, I needed to use spectator numbers, and to be precise, I needed photos from lots of matches with pretty low attendances!

To the rescue came David Bauckham from Centre Circle Publishing. David has an amazing portfolio of photos on his Flickr account, however being a professional photographer, he doesn’t give his images away for free. After introducing myself and explaining the concept, David kindly agreed to let us use some of his photos on our project, and without his generosity, the GroundTweet wouldn’t have been possible.

The final link in the chain, and the real genius behind the site is another person who I have never met, but whose brilliant mind and awesome coding skills have created GroundTweet. @rcammisola (Rocco) responded to a tweet I sent asking for help with the project, and from the very start has been generous with his time, and extremely competent with his design skills. He has managed to take my roughly formed ideas and create something genuinely wonderful with them, and for this I am eternally grateful. Rocco is a lovely bloke, a brilliant developer, and one day he will be a very rich man. He also knows an obscene amount about football, which is handy too.

So that’s the story of the site. I hope you enjoy GroundTweet, and I hope you were happy with the club with whom you were paired!

The competition celebrates the team who sets off a disastrous chain of losing results which culminates in Wembley’s beaten FA Cup finalists, and this year we are pleased to acclaim new champions who have snatched the crown from last season’s victors, Hillingdon Borough.

A enthralled crowd of 107 packed the allpay.park stadium to watch the Midland Football Alliance side from Herefordshire comfortably seen off by a score of 4-2 by Norton United of North West Counties League Division One. The tie was effectively wrapped up by the visitors by half-time when they lead 0-4 following some defending described on Westfields’ own website as like that of a “school boy”. The game, which took place on the 20th August 2011, marks the first major trophy won by “The Fields” since their formation in 1966. Other previous notable achievements include a 4th round appearance in the 1986/87 FA Vase competition and best league position of 6th in the Midland Football Alliance.

Winning the Reverse FA Cup is a massive triumph for a club of Westfields F.C. stature, and everyone at The Bootiful Game wishes to congratulate manager Sean Edwards and his squad of players on this achievement.

For more information on Westfields F.C. please visit their website at: http://www.westfieldsfc.com

It is widely acknowledged that since the formation of the Premier League, the number of foreign players playing in the English top flight has been increasing over time, however I wanted to see if over this period there had been any sort of shift in terms of the locations these players were arriving from.  Interestingly, the graph shows that firstly, the actual number of foreign players in the Premier League does now appear to have plateaued out, and to date in the 2011/12 season, the number of foreign players who have taken part in at least 1 game, has actually dropped quite considerably.  Obviously, the season hasn’t yet finished, so there is still scope for this figure to move upwards, however, since the 2007/08 season, the number of foreign players has not risen, from a high of 276 players.  The overall picture shows that the number of European players seems to have stabilized, whereas the proportion of African and South American players is still rising.

This graph forms the first part of a body of statistics that I am looking to put together over the next few months, so keep checking back for the next round of findings…

For the purposes of clarity, foreign players are defined in this case as players who’s countries of birth are outside of: England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  In order to be included in the findings, the player must have taken part in at least 1 Premier League game during the season in question.