By Johnny Salinas
Man United Devils is a blog site that focuses around the most successful club of the English Premier league, Manchester United. The blog is independently run and is in no way officially associated with the club. On the blog, one can find news pertaining to club on events such as players bought during the transfer windows, which players the owner of the blog thinks should be brought to the club when a transfer window opens, performance review pertaining to the season and how the club fared during the season, team news (such as injuries) and how the players are getting along with the managers (these blog posts only started appearing after Alex Ferguson retired).
To start things off, let’s look at the writing style of the author(s) and the blog. The writing style of this blog is very similar to, if not exactly the same as, the writing style seen in many different blogs. The blog posts essentially follow a streaming pattern where the newest blog post shows up at the top of stream on the home page, followed by the second newest blog post and so on. As with most blogs, the headline of the blog post stands out more so than the actual content because of the different font size. This blog also appears to be written by just one person, or team, who go by the pseudo name of “Man United Devils”. This I find to be a very interesting aspect of the blog because most blogs that I have seen have the real name of the author for each post. The writing seen on this blog also takes comments that players made during interviews and incorporates them into the different blog posts when it concerns players or upcoming events. In addition to the writing, the author also includes videos regarding Manchester United, usually interviews, in some of the posts.
Despite the fact that this blog is supposed to be about Manchester United, it does go beyond the club. What is rather interesting about this blog is that some of the posts deal with other events that are going on in the world of soccer that Manchester United, as a club, is not involved in. Some particular posts that demonstrate how the author goes beyond just the view of the club are the posts that have to deal with how certain club players, such as Phil Jones and Robin Van Persie (http://manuniteddevils.com/robin-van-persie-goal-animation-form/) , had performed or were performing at the 2014 FIFA world cup or how players that were born in England would perform in the future for the national team (http://manuniteddevils.com/three-manchester-united-players-star-world-cup/). Other posts that are not about how the club is doing or did are about other soccer events, such as the release of FIFA 14. There is also one particular post that also stands out so much because of how little it actually has to do with events concerning Manchester United. The post connected to the following link (http://manuniteddevils.com/celebrate-worlds-best-football-teams-polar-bottle/) demonstrates how some of the posts have nothing to do with Manchester United or events surrounding the club at all, since this post seems to act as a form of advertisement.
Like everything in the world, there are both things that work very well for this blog and make it great and things that are bad for this blog. What really seemed to work for this blog was the fact that, at the time of the postings, the blog posts had very recent news regarding the club that was accurate. The color scheme of the blog also worked very well since it coincided with the traditional club color of red that Manchester United has been associated with. The easy to use navigation of the blog makes it really easy to read different posts and navigate through the blogs. The pictures associated with each post nicely fit and are appropriate for almost every post and act as a nice touch for the blog. Despite the fact that there are good aspects that pertain to the blog, there are some things that do not make this a great blog site. One huge negative aspect is that lack of consistency or consistent blogging. Some of the blog posts associated with the blog site are written after quite some time apart, usually about a month or so, and this seems to hurt the blog because it doesn’t seem to satisfy the demands that would associated with soccer that a Manchester United fan would have. The lack of a “search” option also acts as a negative aspect because it takes more effort and time to find some of the earliest posts on the blog site. The aspect that really seems to hurt the blog site appears to be the posts that have nothing to do with soccer, such as the advertisement posts, because those types of posts can act as spam for a true avid soccer fan.
Overall, this blog is truly a great site that is aimed at Manchester United fans and can be appreciated by anyone who truly likes good soccer. The relevance of most of the posts to Manchester United news and easy flow of the blog posts really make this a great blog that any true Manchester United fan should check out sometime. Actually, go check it out now http://manuniteddevils.com/
