State of The Mane Land 1/1/25

Happy New Year, TML family! As we head into 2025, I’d like to update you on how things are going. As always, I want to be transparent with you, because we owe you that for your support over more than a decade of covering Orlando City, the Orlando Pride, OCB, and “all things” soccer-related in the City Beautiful.  (“All things” is in quotation marks because it’s admittedly hyperbolic. We’d love to bring you coverage on everything from the professional teams all the way down to rec league results, but that’s probably a pipe dream. We cover as much as our staff size allows us to cover.)

Let me start by apologizing if this is long (it is long, there’s no “if”). I hope you read it all, but I understand if you don’t. This is just the state of things here as of 1/1/25.

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Our 2024 was awesome. We watched and covered the Orlando Pride’s incredible record-setting, two-trophy season. We watched and covered Orlando City reaching the playoffs for the fifth consecutive year as the team played deeper into the MLS playoffs and Concacaf Champions Cup than ever before. We watched and covered OCB making the MLS NEXT Pro playoffs for the second consecutive season. It was the first time all three of the club’s teams made the postseason in the same year.

We saw Facundo Torres become the all-time leading goal scorer in Orlando City history. We saw an unexpected second season of Duncan McGuire playing in a purple uniform after nearly losing him to Blackburn. Yes, 2024 was a pretty great year for Orlando soccer.

It’s hard to believe The Mane Land is quickly approaching two full years since VOX/SBNation informed me and many other soccer blog managers that they would cease support of our efforts. While that didn’t mean much to us in terms of compensation (almost nothing, in fact, despite many sites like ours operating like a 24/7 source of content and news on their behalf, allowing them to bring in advertising dollars), it was a significant hindrance to us doing this thing we love, because they did a lot of the back-end stuff for us — things like domain registration, technical support of the content management system (that they always seemed to be tinkering with and things often broke as a result), web hosting, etc.

Our readers and podcast listeners stepped up in a big way to help us transition to independence in spring of 2023. The money contributed by our many founders in our GoFundMe campaign and our few member subscribers in our Buy Me a Coffee program has sustained us for two years, establishing our business, paying for expenses like hosting fees, domain registrations/renewals, tax and paperwork filing, etc., and even allowing me to give most of our staff something for their efforts just before Christmas 2023. As the initial GoFundMe dollars continue to recede and are not being adequately replaced by our membership or advertisers, things begin to look a bit scary, but not necessarily dire (yet).

The Plan for Self-Sufficiency

My goal upon The Mane Land becoming independent was to make our site self-sufficient. What that means is that I wanted to be able to pay for the things we need out of a combination of membership subscriptions for additional reader and listener content/perks, merchandise sales, and advertising sales. That part isn’t too hard. The other thing I’d hoped to do to make this site successful was to be able to compensate its contributors regularly, even if it was a small amount. Not only is this important for retention and contributor morale and buy-in, but it would also make it easier to entice new contributors.

I’ve been blessed over the last decade to find other people who share my passion for telling the story of Orlando City, the Pride, and OCB as it unfolds. I consider these contributors friends, colleagues, and co-workers, and I appreciate every single contribution they make to the website, our podcasts, and our social media accounts. They give what they can and I am thankful for every word.

And it kills me that I am failing them and failing you, although I have not quite yet failed completely.

It’s no secret that this is not my “day job.” I work full-time in addition to managing this site. While I’m the kind of person who remains hopeful, I was never under the illusion that TML would grow to the point where I could quit my full-time job and do this for a living. The most optimistic side of me still insists it’s possible in a perfect world…we simply don’t live in a perfect world.

Because I work a 9-to-5 and spend pretty close to full-time hours on The Mane Land as well each week, I have found since our site went independent that I simply don’t have the time to manage and organize the site, write and podcast frequently, and do the things that will bring in the required income to sustain The Mane Land indefinitely without finding more help (which I also don’t have time to do). That’s where I’m failing you, failing our staff, and failing this site (and my business…or side hustle, if you like).

Time: The Enemy

Many hands make light work. Right now, The Mane Land lacks enough hands, and one of my biggest sources of frustration is not having enough time, energy, or success recruiting new contributors.

And this is by no means an issue with current staff. I can’t thank our contributors enough. Senior writer Sean Rollins and David Rohe, my podcast co-host and also a senior writer, have been incredible since their first days in 2014 and 2015, respectively (it blows my mind they’ve been here so long). Marcus Mitchell writes and helps with the editing and is invaluable. Ben Miller has been contributing and being a positive influence in our internal Slack channel since 2017. Dan MacDonald has been photographing games for us when available since 2018. Joshua Taylor kicks in a Lion Links piece every week as he has done since 2020. Nic Josey joined us in 2022 despite being a busy emergency physician by trade, contributing to our coverage. Ryan Smith has mostly stepped away as a staff writer, but even he helped out once or twice in 2024.

We added two fantastic writers in 2024, although Sam Denker, who augmented our Orlando Pride coverage with feature stories this year, has sadly already informed me he is moving on. Andrew DeSalvo has been a world-class addition with his in-depth statistical analysis, overwhelming enthusiasm, and unparalleled volunteerism. The staff has been amazing.

Our first several years, I hardly needed to do any recruiting. I put up a post on the site asking for help, and I’d receve a few dozen emails per year with people volunteering to contribute — soccer fans, aspiring sports journalists looking for experience, college-age writers seeking clips for their portfolio, photographers, graphic artists, etc. Some of those earliest respondents are still on our staff.

For about the last four to five years, the number of applicants has slowed to a trickle. I’m certainly at fault for that, as I don’t spend enough time promoting staff openings or looking for ways to get the word out that don’t eat into our bank account. What was once effortless now requires time and energy. But with a work week of 40+ hours, a daily round-trip commute of an hour, and my various writing and editing duties, I find time to be my biggest obstacle.

And my lack of time is why the financial side of the business isn’t where it needs to be either, because it needs to be in a place where I can not only give our current contributors something for their efforts, but I also need to find incentives for new people to come help us, making the work lighter for everyone, and freeing me up to spend more time running the business.

I have not had the time to properly manage our web shop. I haven’t found the time to design more items or find strategies to sell more of what we have on offer. Our merchandise clearly isn’t resonating, or people simply don’t know about it, and that is something I’d love to have time to fix.

When it comes to raising advertising dollars, I’ve barely had time to put together any pricing, let alone solicit potential advertisers.

And that’s honestly my biggest failing as the managing editor of The Mane Land and owner of the business — not having enough time to do this right. Over the years, we’ve lost a lot of great contributors. That’s nothing new, because blog life isn’t for everyone, and there’s an average shelf life on it. We’ve added some great staff members over the years as well.

One of our biggest challenges is that our current staff almost all live outside the Orlando area, which creates difficulty in staffing matches. Because I believe the best way to cover a team is to do it in person whenever possible, it falls on me to cover the Lions when they’re at home. I’m covering Orlando City matches in person at home and, due to so many of our contributors working nights and weekends, I’m also recapping the road games. In 2024, I covered just about all of the 34 Orlando City regular-season games, five playoff matches, four Concacaf Champions Cup games, and three Leagues Cup matches. That’s more than 45 OCSC games right there.

That’s not a complaint. I love doing it. I’d love it even more if I could scrap the day job and do it full-time, because it’s a huge time commitment on top of a full-time job. Add two to three podcasts per week, writing game previews, editing our contributors’ stories five of the seven nights per week, helping Sean with live coverage when the Pride and OCB play on the same day — and my eternal gratitude to him for dutifully covering the Pride and commuting an hour each way for home matches while also voluntarily providing coverage of OCB and being our primary breaking news writer on weekdays — maintaining our publication schedule, doing most of our social media posts, planning ahead, organizing tasks such as the Season in Review and Top Moments stories, and updating plug-ins and content on the website, and you quickly run out of time to reach out to advertisers, create a rate card for the podcast, design new merchandise, etc.

It also, unfortunately, saps any time I might have to find new contributors for the staff, so it’s a perpetual cycle.

This wasn’t a problem early in our existence, because we had a lot of staff members who lived in town and multiple writers who not only wanted to cover the matches live but actively lobbied to do it. So, it wasn’t necessary for me to cover every game. I wrote more feature stories back then (something I love to do) and had more time for managerial pursuits. Beyond the time commitment, the schedule I’ve been keeping during the soccer season the last few years requires an insane amount of mental energy, because down time comes so infrequently.

Again, this is not meant as a complaint, so my apologies if it sounds like one. If I didn’t love doing this so much, I’d have given it up years ago. It’s merely important to convey this information, so that this State of The Mane Land piece is as transparent as it can be (this is part of the setup, as it were). Summarizing this overly verbose post so far: I don’t have enough time to run this place properly while being responsible for so much of the content, especially the live content, and not having the time to run this place properly is preventing me from finding solutions.

So, what am I driving at, exactly? Bear with me for one more side excursion, and we’ll get there.

Our Financial Health

We began our independence in incredible shape. Our GoFundMe was successful beyond our wildest imaginations. We paid for all up-front costs, like setting up the LLC and some initial design and back-end technical work, as well as two years of everything we needed: web hosting, domain registration fees, our WordPress theme (the site layout, widgets, and font package, essentially), a few WordPress plug-ins we needed, and registered agent services to ensure the business did everything by the book. We also had money to get the business taxes done and make a few minor purchases to help with bookkeeping and day-to-day needs. Life was great because of our GoFundMe Founders.

We did the GoFundMe campaign after having an almost exactly 50/50 split on a couple hundred responses to our online poll, in which we asked our readers and listeners how they’d prefer to support our pivot to independence. About half expressed a preference for a one-time donation through a GoFundMe or Kickstarter type of campaign. The other half said they preferred a recurring monthly subscription service like Patreon (we ended up going with Buy Me a Coffee), in which they would get added content and/or perks for a monthly fee.

Because the split was so close to exactly 50/50, we opted to do both and give everyone a choice. We did not launch these at the same time, and I think that was a mistake on my part. We launched the GoFundMe first, because we needed start-up funds, and if we didn’t reach our goal, our plan was to refund everyone’s money and call it a day. But we surpassed our goal in a matter of hours! In the end, we exceeded our start-up goal by a lot. But I think many people either missed the message that we were planning to do both the GoFundMe and the monthly subscription service, or they were just so eager to provide immediately help that they donated up front. Either way, it ultimately undercut our subscription drive.

Given how successful our GoFundMe was, I figured if we were able to get even half the number of subscribers as we had initial Founders, we’d be in amazing shape — even if the subscribers came in mostly at the Homegrown Player level, rather than TAM Player or Designated Player levels. I vastly overestimated how many subscribers we could count on, basing my estimations on the initial poll, and not thinking about the delayed timing of the subscription launch.

While I wasn’t quite putting my faith in 50/50, I thought we would be able to pull in more subscribers than we did. We fell well short of that, so if people did understand we were doing both, it seems I’ve failed to provide the requisite incentive perks to entice subscribers. I’m certainly willing to take your suggestions for add-ons we can offer that might help increase our subscription base. It’s another thing I haven’t had time to think much about, along with more feature content that I had envisioned doing just for subscribers.

As mentioned above, I have not had the time to properly manage the web store. I haven’t found the time to design more items or find strategies to sell more of what we have on offer. Our merchandise clearly isn’t resonating, or people simply don’t know about it. I realize some people won’t want to wear our logo (although I think it’s cool), and I do have thoughts on other things we can offer that are more soccer-specific in nature, but I haven’t had the (say it with me) time to create them.

In terms of advertising dollars, I’ve barely had time to put together any pricing, let alone solicit potential advertisers. Our podcast got its first real sponsor in 2024 for a limited time, and we profoundly thank WJ Dog Treats for sponsoring a month’s worth of podcasts last year. They were great to work with and we enjoyed ad-libbing their podcast ads. Sorry if they ran a little long. We are verbose and we were having fun.

Why am I telling you all of this behind-the-scenes financial stuff? Because more successful finances would allow me to offer new writers a financial incentive to join the staff. It turns out that there are more people who are willing to write stories every week for $100 a month than people who would do it for free out of their love of the club.

Failures and Successes

It killed me not to be able to compensate our deserving staff writers  in 2024 as I was able to do in 2023. It made me feel good that those who contributed regularly and provided the bulk of our content had a little something extra in their stockings before Christmas 2023. I didn’t mind the hit to the business savings account, because the staff earned it, and I had the ability to pay it, so it was paid.

It also killed me not to be able to send Sean to Kansas City to cover the NWSL final between the Pride and the Washington Spirit. He earned the right to do that with his excellent coverage of the Pride the last few seasons and for voluntarily providing our readers coverage of OCB. We looked into it, but the costs of travel and hotels the week of the NWSL final was just a bit too high for comfort. And you deserve the kind of coverage that comes from our writers being there, too.

We just couldn’t quite do it, because I wanted to avoid cutting things too closely when it comes time for renewing things this spring. I have kept enough in reserve to pay for those upcoming renewals — to have the business taxes done; complete our annual filing; renew the hosting, domain registration, and our theme license; and perhaps have a couple hundred dollars left over in case something unexpected comes up.

I have managed to successfully avoid some expenses since going independent by doing things like moving The Mane Land PawedCast last year to the Fans First Sports Network, which takes care of our podcast hosting costs and helps us promote the show. They’ve been great. They even trickle in a few advertising dollars for us, but we’re talking about a small sum that doesn’t always even make the necessary minimum to distribute it monthly (most months it’s like having one DP-level monthly subscriber).

We began SkoPurp Soccer: An Orlando Pride PawedCast to better serve Orlando Pride fans in 2023, and we enjoy doing it. We are hosting that for free on Spotify for Podcasters, which is a bit limiting as a platform, but it gets the job done at no cost. Our goal is to move that show to FFSN when the audience grows sufficiently to make it worth their while. That hasn’t yet happened, and probably won’t have much (if any) positive financial impact when/if it does, but it will be a step in the right direction for the show.

However, starting that show created another recurring time commitment for me. I wanted to find a permanent host for it who wasn’t me, but so far, we’ve had no one express interest in taking it over.

Our Future

If any or all of the above sounds at all ominous, or even complain-y, it’s not meant to be. Our situation is serious, but at the end of the day, this endeavor is just a blog and a couple of podcasts. My plan is for us to continue through 2025 and beyond, but we have some important milestone deadlines ahead, and the first of those comes up in the spring, when I must determine whether the business will/should continue. So, we’ll approach the season as if we’ll be here throughout 2025, but if i’m being honest, there’s a legit chance it stops before the MLS All-Star break. I can’t help that right now, as much as I wish I could.

Our future is not money-driven (not in a strict sense). We have the funds to pay for another year and probably two with what is in the bank and the small amount we have coming in from subscribers. I’ve even had staff members volunteer to pay some of our costs if need be. That is extremely humbling, and they have my undying love for offering, but that’s not the issue. We have the financial means to survive, even if we aren’t exactly thriving.

However, to make TML work as a business requires me to have more time to do the things that will sustain us — finding more volunteer contributors (who would possibly be compensated when income allows, but with no guarantees) or moving the business to a level of financial health that would allow us to attract paid contributors. The common theme here is the “more hands” thing. TML doesn’t need to make money, as nice as that would be. It needs to not lose money, to sustain itself, and (optimally) to give at least some small reward to those creative people putting in the work.

In short (LOL, I know), our continued existence is threatened not by a lack of revenue, but by a lack of time, and more specifically, my lack of time.

As much as I love every minute I spend on this site and our podcasts, it isn’t healthy to spend so many of those minutes doing it. Fatigue is real. Burnout is real. Anxiety about who will cover a game if I want to occasionally spend a weekend in the mountains with no Wi-Fi is real. Mentally, I’ve been running on fumes by midseason each of the last few years, and by the end of the year I’m a complete wreck. I have poured more than a decade of my life into this labor of love and have done so gladly, but my body and brain keep reminding me I’m not a kid anymore. I must have more down time, more days off during the season, and a chance to unplug and quiet my mind. The only way for me to get that time is by adding more staff writers (especially local ones) and editors. Not having the time to beat the bushes to find them is agonizingly ironic.

While our plan is to continue indefinitely as we have, I must honestly admit that “indefinitely” may not include the entirety of 2025. I need to have an answer on our continued existence in place by the first week of March. This is a self-imposed deadline, but there’s no sense in spending a few hundred dollars on recurring business expenses in the spring if nothing changes, and I don’t want to feel at the end of 2025 like I did at the end of 2024. I’d rather dissolve the company and split whatever remains in our bank account among the people who have helped me do this over the years.

If we can add staff writers/editors, we can and will continue for as long as you’ll have us. It seems so simple. It used to be. It has not been since about 2018 or so.

What Can You Do?

If you’re one of those souls who is prone to asking, “What can I do to help?”, first, bless you. The world needs more people like that. Secondly, there are a few things.

First, think hard about the people you know (or even yourself). Do you or someone you know follow soccer and have the ability and willingness to write? If so (and remember: if you can talk about soccer, you can probably write about it), you or that person can join our staff and help us build our numbers to lighten my load and the load of the staff, so that we have more time for recharging our batteries and growing the business side of things.

Do you or someone you know own a business? If so, perhaps we can partner up on something that would enable us to provide advertising inventory to you that would help your business, while the ad revenue would specifically endow a paid beat writer during the season.

Are you or someone you know creative? If so, you could suggest ways we can improve our Buy Me a Coffee subscription or web shop offerings. You might even donate a design for a t-shirt or other merchandise. Or you might be able to help us with some graphics to help our social media posts pop, drawing more attention to TML, which might translate into more subscribers.

Other free things you can do include chatting up your friends (real and virtual) about us on Facebook, Twitter (never X), BlueSky, Reddit, or elsewhere. You could repost or share our stories and include your personal thoughts on what you liked about them or why they made you happy/angry/sad/curious/etc. You could urge your Orlando City/Pride-loving friends to become readers or podcast listeners. All of these things might help us find people who may want to contribute to the site/podcasts or help build revenue to where we can add paid contributors.

All the above would cost you nothing, except the advertising, which is a business expense, and if you’re doing that with us, you’ll probably be doing that elsewhere anyway.

Finally, you can check out our Buy Me a Coffee page and consider whether our stories/podcasts enrich you enough to commit to a subscription. Do we provide you with $5 worth of entertainment per month? If so, please consider supporting us at the Homegrown Player Level. If you are in a position to help and like the perks we offer, you could consider subscribing at a higher level. Building finances and becoming capable of paying contributors would help with the whole time thing.

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No one ever knows what the future holds in any aspect of life. We hope to be around for a long time. Whether that happens almost entirely depends on how successful we are in augmenting our staff with people who are as excited as we are about telling the story of the soccer club as it unfolds. As long as we’re here, we’ll continue to do our best to bring you worthwhile coverage of the club.

Thank you so much for your support. I am humbled and encouraged by it, and I am keeping the faith. We will keep doing our thing as usual for now. I will reassess in a couple of months and I will keep you informed.

We here at The Mane Land wish you a happy, healthy, successful 2025, and if the club wins more trophies, that would be nice too.