Follow your football team online - 5 steps to do it

1. Add a gadget

Stay up to date with the latest news by adding a gadget in your Sidebar. Arsenal FC are developing their own, coming soon to www.arsenal.com. Leeds aren’t as progressive, so I rely on the BBC. By going to www.bbc.co.uk/football in Internet Explorer 7 and clicking the Sports Feeds link, I can select the Football feed. Clicking subscribe adds it to my list of favourite feeds.

Next, click the plus symbol at the top, select Feed Headlines and choose the BBC Football feed from the gadget’s tools menu, which gives the latest headlines and scores.

2. Talk to fans

Join an interactive forum and discuss the club’s progress with other diehard fans. Many sides have official forums on their web sites, but the most interesting debates are often in the unofficial forums. I’ve found the members at www.leedsunitedforum.co.uk to be a small but passionate community. For a more general chat with a wider audience, large sites such as www.thefootballforum.net are excellent.

3. Run the team yourself

If you’re tired of managers making duff decisions, why not grab hold of the reins yourself? Football Manager 2007 helps you pretend. Find out more at www.footballmanager.net.

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4. Listen to commentary

There are a fair few amateur radio efforts knocking around. I enjoy the banter between two English expats in America in the Soccer Shout Podcast – soccershout.com – so I’ve subscribed via RSS using a free program called Juice (juicereceiver.sourceforge.net).

To do it yourself, download the program and run it, click Add Feed, and enter the address of the podcast’s feed you found in Internet Explorer (in this case soccershout.com/rss). Add as many feeds as you like and then simply click Check for new podcasts to update them all.

5. Get news to your inbox

If email’s more your bag, The Guardian produces a daily football newsletter called The Fiver, so called because it arrives at around 5pm on Monday to Friday. I find it’s a humorous look at the day’s machinations, and it enjoys a wide audience – not just in this country, but across the world.

Head to football.guardian.co.uk/fiver for the latest issue and details on how to subscribe.

Mike Channel contributes to Windows Vista: The Official Magazine, and is works on PC Format.

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