Soccerpulse

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Footballforum |- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;" ! Registration | Free registration |- style="vertical-align: top;" ! Owner | Pulse Network |- style="vertical-align: top;" ! Created by | |- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;" ! Launched | |- class="hiddenStructure" style="vertical-align: top;" ! Current status of site | |} Soccerpulse (known colloquially as 'SP') is an internet forum and general football site that was founded in the Spring of 2002, since then it has grown considerably and now ranks #2 on the list of non corporately run football discussion forums on the internet (second to BigSoccer) and #1 if forums with corporate affiliations are excluded and is ranked among the top 900 forums on the internet according to Big Boards.

Though the site offers general football news, statistics and wallpapers, the main focus of activity on Soccerpulse is undoubtedly the discussion forums (although there is an ongoing project to bring the site into line dubbed 'V3'), of which the video forum is especially popular and frequented, being widely regarded as one of the best places on the internet to find videos of recent matches and happenings in the world of football, recieving over (Insert When World Cup is over) hits during the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The videos are not hosted on the website, but usually on hosting sites such as yousendit and megaupload with the links being posted in the forums. Many of Soccerpulse's members are actively involved in editting and creating video compilations in addition to capping whole matches and highlights, this leads to not just quanity but variety within Soccerpulse's video forums.

The other most frequented section are the European football forums with the English Premiership the most popular. Another notable trend is discussion comparing players, both past and present, so much that separate forums are devoted entirely to the comparison of individual players.

Soccerpulse also contains an "Off The Pitch" section where members are able to post material that is not necessarily related to football.

Creation and Early Days (V1)

TBA

Resurrecution and Redesign (V2)

TBA

It was during the latter period of this version of Soccerpulse that both Nomis and Hummel, recognized international boot makers, established a presence on the forums posting information on current and future products and answering members questions in the Kitbag forum.

Issues with the TBA

TBA

The Future of Soccerpulse

TBA

The SPPL

The SPPL is Soccerpulse's unique team based prediction league which takes the traditional prediction based games you see on many forums and turns them on their head. The game takes the form of members creating teams of 4 and competing in a league like real life football teams.

Each week a team will play another team in its conference in a match of sorts. Each member is allocated a specific football match that week to predict upon and guesses not only the result but the exact scoreline, the member scores 1 pt if he correctly gets the result and 3 pts if he gets the score exactly right aswell. A member of the opposing team will also be predicting on exactly the same match, four matches are predicted upon, one for each member of the team with the matches usually all taking place over the span of the weekend.

Once all the matches have been played and team's pts totals tallied up, the result of the match is decided, say for example Team A scored 7 pts, while Team B who they were playing scored 5 pts. Team A would have won this match 7-5 and thus gained 3 pts towards their standing in the league table, Team B would have gained 0 pts.

Teamwork plays a large part in the game and it's been well proven that teams that discuss their predictions before making them perform much better than those that predict on an ad-hoc basis.

The game was designed during the summer of 2004, primarily by Soccerpulse members Christoval, Macca and Rossoneri with additional input from Alex™ in the latter period, these members together formed the SPPL FA who organised the running of the game. The present FA line up consists of Christoval, Macca and Alex™.

Season One (Autumn/Winter '04)

Season One was conceived in the summer of 2004 and consisted of 13 teams, run in a largely ad-hoc manner due to inexperience and unfamiliarity with the rules the season was nevertheless a success. Originally meant to be a team based survivor style game, it soon evolved far beyond that idea.

Based in its own forum on the main Soccerpulse board this season was notable for its abundance of trash talk in which members of teams would post humourous articles about the antics of other teams to try to disrespect them, numerous friendly rivalries sprung up as a result of this, notable examples being that between 1th Place United and the Unholy Alliance and The Coalition and Evolution FC.This sense of community spirit and fun has been a casualty of the enlargement of both Soccerpulse and the SPPL as time has gone by and is much lamented by some of the original members.

Eventually due to the success of season one a decision was made to cut the league in half from the original aim of running it parrallel to the European football season to ending it before Christmas 2004 with the aim of a second season launching in the new year to allow more of the quickly expanding Soccerpulse userbase to join.

This season's winners were The Coalition, who led for most of the season after hitting the top place after seven games, going unbeaten until four games until the end of the season. In second place was the Unholy Alliance, a team made up of Real Madrid and Barcelona supporters, and in third place was 1th Place United, a team made up mostly of moderation team members failing to live up to their intentionally mispelt name.

Season Two(Spring/Summer '05)

With the expansion of the Soccerpulse forums bringing many more members to the attention of the SPPL game, the decision was made to split the league into two equal conferences with a tree based play off system similar to the NHL joining the two leagues together after a league period where the play off qualifiers were decided.

The aim of this was to prevent the situation where those teams at the bottom of the league gave up playing due to having no hope of winning and thus indirectly affected other teams results as a consequence of their inactivity and thus affected the whole outcome of the league. The conference based system was designed to ensure teams always had something to play for right up to the end of the season, and was mostly a success with fewer inactive teams than season one.

The Conferences were named after two FA members' favourite bands, Gomez conference named after the Scottish band Gomez for Macca and Rage conference named after Rage Against The Machine for Christoval, this unique naming convention would continue in season three.

After predicting on games from La Liga, English Premier League and Serie A over the second half of the football season, two teams emerged from the league and play off system as respective champions of their conferences. The Fantastic Four had won Rage, while The Internationals won the Gomez conference

After a hard fought final, The Fantastic Four won through to become the SPPL Season Two Champions, the season was on the whole a success once again, although the limitations of the administrative system were becoming evident, as the spreadsheet system used at the time was beginning to become too time consuming to use for the ever increasing numbers of members, this lead directly to the large departure that was the aborted Season Three.

During the summer break, a Super Cup was played between Season One Champions The Coalition and Season Two Champions The Fantastic Four with friendly matches being predicted upon, The Coalition won this match and thus became the most successful SPPL team so far with two competition victories compared to The Fantastic Four's one.

Season Three(Autumn '05-Cancelled)

Season Three was first conceived as a continuation of the previous seasons with exactly the same set up, however once registration was opened up and it become clear that nearly double the teams would register than did in Season Two thoughts turned to a way to provide a system was wasn't nearly as adminstratively time consuming.

Eventually a php script based on the Soccerpulse website was created for the purpose of playing the game and predicting and on the surface compared favourably with the fantasty football games you see on professional media websites, however underneath it was very buggy and this would lead directly to the cancelling of Season Three.

Two more conferences were added to the league to provide for the increased number of teams, with each conference now numbering ten teams, bringing the total teams to 40 and the total players close to 160. The new conference were named Franz after Franz Ferdinand for Alex™ and Daft after Daft Punk for part time FA member Juventino Sempre. Daft Conference soon became running joke within the SPPL due to the semi-insulting nature of putting a team in such a conference.

All the big teams from the previous seasons such as The Coalition, Hardly Athletic (1th Place United), OTD FC (Unholy Alliance), The Fantastic Four and The Internationals joined up again and were joined by various new teams such as Los Rojos and WASP (We Are Soccer Predictors).

The season lasted until early 2006 when the underlying flaws of the script and constant problems it caused made the continuation of the league untenable, overall the season was a failure but important lessons were learned for Season Four, such as experience with the php script, which should ensure Season Four will run much far more efficiently and effectively.

No date has currently been scheduled for Season Four, but the creation of a new script for it falls under the "V3" banner and the tentative date is for it to coincide with the start of the 06/07 season, although this may be too ambitious a target to reach considering the work needed.

Statistics

Honours
Season 1 Champions: The Coalition

Season 2 Champions: The Fantastic Four
Season 2 Gomez Conference Champions: The Internationals
Season 2 Rage Conference Champions: The Fantastic Four

SPPL Super Cup Winners: The Coalition

Records

Moderation Team

With its large userbase and traffic ratings Soccerpulse has had to develop a large moderation team to keep the forums running smoothly and organised, at present day this stands at fifty three different moderators, they are as follows:

Admins Christoval, frstplce and Alex™

Global Moderators AF279, Barca 4 Life, Carlos™, Geoffrey, Joshinho, Macca, Mattaay, Miguel Piñero, rafa b, and the baumer

Moderators Asshat, Benj, bob, bretless, CaptainCarrots, Carlton Banks, Catwoman, Crofty, d.man, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Djibrilliant, Dreamlander, Easy V, Eazy E, energy41, ErnestEnzo, fakemadrid, footyfanatic, Fresh Prince, JolieBrookLyn, Juventino Sempre, Leon Vista, Les Savy Fav, Mané Garrincha, Maurice, Nando, OliverW, Panna KO, Pepe, Rab C Nesbitt, Renee, Richie2710, Rudi Völler, Ryan Babel, sandesh, StandFree, Strike-for-Germany, StrokingMonkeys, thamaster83, the SS andy, White Hart, Xyrus, and ~Ferrari~

Statistics

All graphs are based on yearly data, were provided by Big Boards and were accurate up to the 27th June2006:

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See also

Similar websites:

• BigSoccer
• Xtratime

External links

• [Soccerpulse Site]
• [Soccerpulse's Alexa Listing]
• [Soccerpulse's Big Board's Listing]

 

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