Momentum continues to grow behind the campaign to stop the Football League, Dataco, and its legal allies trying to close down unofficial sites like UptheSaddlers. Today’s Guardian contains a full page article by David Conn, sports news reporter of the year, highlighting Dataco’s attempts to extract money from the Watford fansite BSad.Org.

Ridiculous as it may seem it appears the Football League through Dataco spend more money hiring legal people to monitor whether an unofficial site publishes fixture information than they actually charge a website for publishing a club’s fixtures (£266 + VAT per year).

Although the sum looks small in fact £300 quid is usually more than the annual running costs of all but the biggest unofficial sites, the vast majority of which - including this one - are not-for-profit, free from ads, and serve as a benefit for fans and therefore the football clubs. Football clubs including Walsall have long operated an antagonistic relationship based on suspicion with unofficial sites as they don’t understand the non-commercial motives - grounded in the belief that a website must exist to make money, and if upthesaddlers is making money then it is taking money away from saddlers.co.uk

Every year on fixture release day in June UptheSaddlers receives a strongly worded email warning from both Andrew Poole at Walsall FC and a firm of lawyers in London usually because a visitor in their excitement has posted the season’s fixtures on this site’s message board. By pursuing other sites in a similar way Dataco have managed to get sites taken offline. Meanwhile the official site attempts to generate further cash from supporters by first releasing the fixtures via SMS at 25p per message.