Annual Report for Scuffed

A good year in 2022, an increased focus on the U.S. Women's National Team in 2023.

Hey everyone. Happy New Year! We’ve gone a little quiet these past two weeks, but now we’re revving back up. Watke, Vince and I will record a Monday Review on Tuesday, and then the podcasting schedule starts to fill up fast.

I want to take the beginning of the year as a chance to give an annual report on Scuffed. (This wouldn’t pass muster with federal regulators, but look, somebody needs to check in with people. The Fed ain’t doing it.) I’ve even created subheadings and bolded some key parts for anyone too busy to do more than skim something like this.

Stats

We published 117 episodes for the public in 2022, the majority of which were the traditional Greg Velasquez-Adam Belz formula. We recapped every USMNT match and dropped near-daily episodes during the World Cup. We covered the Concacaf Women’s Championship, and interviewed people like Mikey Varas, Chris Richards and Naomi Girma. 

For paying patrons of Scuffed, we published 53 more episodes. The vast majority of those were the Monday Review, but we also released extended interviews with Jimmy Conrad, Jenny Chiu and Michele Giannone, recorded and published call-in shows live on Discord (thanks Joey!), and put together five reviews of classic USMNT World Cup matches, which have sort of become their own genre in the Scuffed Universe.

Thanks for reading this! It’s actually not weekly anymore, despite the name. It’s very occasional. But if you want to sign up to receive future dispatches, here’s the spot.

Community

The episodes, and how well we pitch them on social media, are obviously important, and I will talk more about that later. But first I gotta talk about the community that’s grown around the podcast, mostly in the past 18 months. I used to shy away from the word “community.” It felt over-used and sanctimonious. But it really is a major part of what draws people to Scuffed and keeps them around, so I don't shy away from it so much anymore. 

The Discord server, which we launched in June 2021, is a niche within a niche, a place that’s valuable to maybe a quarter of our paying subscribers. But I think it is, thanks to moderator Jordan and the roughly 200 people who communicate there frequently, one of the better places online to discuss American soccer. 

And the community isn’t just online, blessedly. In 2022 we had two big in-person events — the meetup at the brewery in St. Paul before the win over Honduras, and then the tailgate in Orlando before the win over Panama. Soccer fandom in America has at times been a lonely pursuit, and it’s satisfying to meet so many other people who are on the same page. In St. Paul we sang together, and rondoed on the concrete when it was 0 degrees. In Orlando, about 100 of us played pickup soccer, then around 200 of us ate and drank in the breezy warmth of Central Florida before we watched the boys punch their ticket to the World Cup at Exploria. Although none of us on the show made the trip to Qatar, some listeners did. One of them, Dave Lawrence, brought the Scuffed flag with him. He, Rob Cervantes and several others joined up in Doha repeatedly, so I like to think of that as an in-person event too.

The Business

We now have about 2,000 paying subscribers on Patreon, compared to 741 at the beginning of 2022. This makes Scuffed a viable business. Six people now receive some kind of regular pay, a handful of others are paid for their work less regularly, and going forward we will have more freedom to commission work and pay for it.

My analysis of the increase in patrons is simple. The reason is the Monday Reviews. Chris (Watke) and I started recording episodes together in the fall of 2021, pretty much just messing around. At first we did the shows live on the Discord server and then not live, and then at Chris’s urging, Vince (who was fun to chat with and listen to in our live show experiments on Discord) joined us and we settled on a rough format last December. It clicked, we enjoyed it, and people seemed to like it. Then we made those Monday Reviews exclusive to patrons. The tech is simple, we just needed to make the decision. At the suggestion of a listener, we did. Subscriptions rose 67% in the first quarter of 2022, which then and now still seems like a miraculous increase, but not a coincidence.

Greg and his meticulous, good-natured analysis are the foundation of the podcast’s appeal over time, in my opinion, and probably why many of you listen. What Vince and Chris and I have figured out is something that’s  a) doable for us, and b) listenable and hopefully useful. Being able to offer one episode per week as a benefit to subscribers on Patreon has become crucial to the enterprise. I’m grateful for Chris and Vince as collaborators. I know listeners are grateful for them too.

What's on tap in 2023

We will continue to do the same things — a Monday Review every week, an episode with Greg and Belz pretty much every week, lots of recaps and plenty of discussion of the youth national teams, especially the U20s as they prepare for a World Cup.

We will also do a better, more thorough job of covering the women’s national team in 2023. We recapped most, but not all, USWNT games starting last summer. We’ll recap all the games now. That will mostly be Greg and me, but I expect others will be needed and am open to suggestions on who that should be.

In addition, Vince, Tara and I are planning a recurring episode every other Wednesday starting Jan. 11, focused only on women’s soccer, and of course primarily on the U.S. Women’s National Team. Vince you know from the Monday Reviews. Some of you know Tara on the Discord. She helped us recap the USA’s three U20 Women’s World Cup matches in the summer and has lent her voice to several call-in shows on Discord. I think the three of us will have a good time and the episodes should be fun to listen to. 

Next month, Vince and I, and maybe Greg, will be in Nashville on Feb. 19 to watch the U.S. women take on Japan. I’m going to try to organize pickup soccer for that morning, and we’ll tailgate outside Geodis Park before the match. So look out for details on that and please join us.

The other thing I’d like to improve about our podcast is for me to conduct more one-on-one interviews. I can’t guarantee success, but I will try. Scuffed now has a solid financial foundation, but still not a lot of pull, as a brand, with the gatekeepers of professional soccer players — the vice presidents of communication, the agents, probably the players themselves. When I ask for a 30-minute interview with a player, the answer is usually not “yes.” I have to figure out how to overcome that. One of my new year resolutions is to persist. Wish me luck.

Thanks everyone for listening to our podcast. Thanks especially to those of you who subscribe on Patreon, tailgate with us and make the Discord fun. Wishing you good health and warm relationships in this new year. Let’s go.

Belz