Five·a·Sideabout
Following football shouldn't feel like work
The game is beautiful. The feeds about it mostly aren't — every match a war, every teenager a failure by half-time.
Five-a-Side is the opposite machine. Three calm rooms, and then it ends. Nothing to pull down, nothing to refresh, nobody yelling.
Ted is the assistant manager
He watches everything, writes the verdicts and the weekly reads, and never picks the team. He is an AI and can be wrong; every verdict includes the trigger that would change his mind.
Three rooms, one rule each
What happened. The league, identical for
everyone who opens it. No squads, nothing personal.
What we did about it. Five squads, five
weekly reads, one mini-league, and a sixth squad that Ted picks from
scratch every week and never enters.
What Ted knows. Every player there is
evidence on, the injury room and the fixture runs. A name in the file opens
everything known about him.
Convictions baked in
The pulse, not the flood
Enough to hold your own at the pub — scores, the table, the
week's real stories. If it doesn't help you love the game more, it doesn't make
the page.
Facts from data, judgment marked as judgment
Prices, points, squads, chips and fixtures come from the
data. Ted writes the opinions, labels them, and says what would change his mind.
A verdict is a hypothesis with a trigger
Four words — nailed, solid, watch, sack — each with one line
of why and, written before the fact, what would change it. That last part makes
a retro possible instead of a debate.
The long game
One weekend of upsets and stoppage-time luck is not evidence.
Early in a season the page says so, and retires the warning once there is enough
football to argue from.
Put it on your phone
It installs like an app and opens without a signal. No app store, nothing to update — it is the same site, in its own window.
iPhone or iPad
Open Five-a-Side in Safari, tap Share, then
Add to Home Screen. It has to be Safari — Chrome on iOS cannot
install it.
Android
Chrome usually offers it by itself. If it does not, the
three-dot menu has Install app or Add to Home
screen.
Mac or Windows
In Chrome or Edge, the install icon sits at the right-hand
end of the address bar. Safari on macOS has File › Add to
Dock.
What works without signal
Whatever you last loaded — the table, the file, the week.
Live scores and the gaffers room need the network, because both are asking
somebody a question at that moment.