maltafootball.com

maltafootball.com is ten years old

maltafootball.com is ten years old.

The site was launched as the Maltese Soccer Web Site back in August 1996, ten months after internet access was made publicly available in Malta. In summer 1996, there was hardly anything related to football in Malta, except for an unofficial Floriana FC site and another site listing Premier League results.

Back in July, I started developing an unofficial website dedicated to the then Premier League side Rabat Ajax. The site included a section about Premier League football. As soon as the site went online, I was constantly receiving emails from people suggesting a much wider coverage. The section dedicated to the Premier League therefore became a site on its own and hence, the Maltese Soccer Web Site was launched in August 1996.

The main target was to provide a comprehensive guide about football in Malta and Gozo, along the same lines of web sites dedicated to football in other countries.

At first, coverage focussed on the Premier, First, Second and Third Division leagues but football in Gozo, youth and women's football were soon featured as well.

After three years hosted on a GeoCities server, the Maltese Soccer Web Site moved to another server for another two years. Then on its fifth birthday, in August 2001, the site went through a complete overhaul. The site changed name and server and became maltafootball.com.

This also resulted in a sharp increase in the number of unique visitors.

News updated to the minute, wide coverage of Premier League football – previews, match reports, photos and live scores; results, scorers and tables of all competitions from the First to Third Division, GFA competitions and Women’s Football, results and tables from the Youth League, Youth FA competitions and Futsal League and a detailed archive of statistics are now available. News provided by maltafootball.com is also available on Vodafone live!

I would like to conclude by thanking all those who supported me in some way or another over the past ten years. Thanks to those who help me out by providing results and scorers; professional photographers Stephen Gatt and Domenic Aquilina for making the site richer with their photos; Martin Debattista and Toni Sant from MaltaMedia for believing in the job I was doing and for their support over the past five years.

I would also like to thank the thousands who visit the site regularly - association, club and match officials, coaches, players and supporters. The fact that these are finding maltafootball.com a useful resource is what keeps me going on.

Antoine Busuttil
Editor - maltafootball.com

31/08/2006 09:02:34

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