Welcome to Unexpected Delirium
On leaping into the unknown
Of course, this was written several days before anybody would see it, because I am a genius. It all still stands, as of the 9th June - the ‘About’ page will be regularly updated as things change over the next few weeks and I start to find out what this broad new horizon actually looks like.
I’m not going to lie, it’s quite frightening. Redundancy hasn’t previously hit me in the last 25 years, and the world has changed a lot, in that time My world has changed a lot in that time.
So, a quick introduction:
My name is Ian King, and I’ve been writing about football since 2006. I owned - well, still own; it’s just gathering dust, these days - Twohundredpercent, but from 2021 I was a features writer for Football365. Well, that time came to an end with the end of the 2022/23 season. As of the end of May I’ve had to become a freelancer, and Substack is my best opportunity to secure a regular income stream.
Imposter syndrome is real and I may be about the world’s worst salesman, but what I’m planning for this place to start with is a minimum of two long-ish reads per week, a lengthy write-up on the previous weekend, taking in the Premier League, the EFL, non-league and other European club football into your inbox first thing on Monday morning. Then first thing on the Thursday morning I’ll drop in a second piece that I consider to be interest, something in-depth, analytical or investigative. Each week, one will be free to read, and the other will be behind the paywall.
I am very, very aware of the fact that I am asking for money here, so all of this has to offer value. Of course, the more paid subscribers I get the more time I can dedicate to it and what I’ve outlined above will be an absolute base minimum. Those among you who know me will already be aware that I have a pretty limitless capacity for this sort of thing, but I am also a single parent with two children aged five and seven. I have to support them and keeping a roof over all of our heads has to be my first priority. To be able to support us through this alone would be a dream come true, but I have to be realistic.
Edward Carter and I are also at the point of starting a new podcast series, which will be combining our love of football with our love of stomach-churningly bad old television shows. This is literally at the point of being able to be recorded, and I’m optimistic that it’ll be pretty good. Literally the only thing stopping us from churning out our first episode is, as I type these words, having a name for it. Hopefully it will have come to me by the time you read this. It’ll be called You Couldn’t Script This, and the first episode will be free to all, but after that it’ll go behind the paywall. If you’re interested in sponsoring it, then do get in touch.
So there we are. If you want to read more or less the same thing, only with a little more detail, it’s all on the About page. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to take a great leap into the unknown.