Easy ways to follow football wherever you are

Football fans can breathe a sigh of relief; the wait is over and another gripping season is about to begin. And whether you’re a Manchester United or Millwall supporter, your PC can unlock new areas of the beautiful game.

Being a hardcore football fan takes serious dedication, and the constant effort of keeping up with news and being the first to hear those inevitable, often ridiculous, transfer rumours can be a struggle. However, Windows Vista can help you keep up to date through the wonders of RSS feeds.

RSS feeds deliver headlines to your PC without you having to access a number of web sites individually. This gives you all the information you want in one easy-toaccess place, saving you stacks of time and ensuring you’re the first to know who’s signed where and for how much.

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Team talk

To start your stream of RSS feeds you simply need to find web sites that provide up-to-date information on your team. BBC Sport is a reliable resource for teams in any league, and often breaks stories as they happen.

While the latest official news is easy to find, in the world of football, rumours are often rife before anything actually happens. The Guardian runs an excellent daily column, The Rumour Mill, on its Unlimited Football service.

When you find an available RSS feed, the icon on the Internet Explorer 7 toolbar will turn orange. Simply click this icon to bring up a synopsis of the feed, and then click Subscribe to add it to the Feed menu in the Favorites Center.

You can choose how these feeds are viewed – either through Windows Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft Office Outlook or the Windows Sidebar. The sidebar in Windows Vista displays any RSS feed you’ve subscribed to on your desktop. For a step-by-step guide to adding your football news feed, check out our tutorial on page 55.

Sticking with the Sidebar, some Premiership clubs now provide their own gadgets so that fans can keep up with the latest news, as well as having their desktop emblazoned with the team’s colours – you can choose between home and away – and motifs. This can all be downloaded for free from the official team web sites.

With help like this from Windows Vista you should soon become an expert on all things football. Armed with ‘the knowledge’, you now have the chance to pit your wits against your friends in a fantasy football competition.

Points mean prizes

The concept of fantasy football is basically this: you form a league with your friends and choose a team of players from the Premiership. Your chosen players earn you points depending on how they perform in their real-world games. The element of skill, then, is in predicting which players are going to perform, and knowing when to transfer your off-form players for better ones.

Most newspapers run their own fantasy football leagues, which you can enter online, although many require an entry fee. However, the official Premier League fantasy competition is free to enter, easy to use and provides great entertainment throughout the season.

You can sign up at Fantasy Premier League. There are prizes to be won for finishing in the top positions, and in several cup competitions – but then again, who needs prizes when you can get ultimate bragging rights over your mates?

Of course, the most important moments for fans are the really big games. All FA Cup and most Champions League games are televised on BBC or ITV, which means you can watch and record them using Windows Media Center. That way you need never miss an important match again.

When it comes to the day-to-day fixtures that don’t get shown on TV, there’s no reason to miss out on tracking the progress of your team. A lot of games are covered by BBC Radio Five Live and its digital brother Sports Extra. Try downloading the BBC Radio gadget for the Windows Vista Sidebar so you can celebrate every goal and berate every dodgy offside decision the moment it happens.

An important element of being a football fan is engaging in regular, heated debates about tactics, decisions, player selection and all-time dream teams. This stalwart subject of pub conversation is now growing in popularity on online forums. Most official and unofficial club sites run forums for fans to voice their opinions, but there are some general ones that are also worth checking out – Football Forums and Double Yellow Card both offer constructive thoughts and discussions with thousands of like-minded fans.

And if your passion for football extends beyond watching and discussing, your PC can further satiate your hunger for goal-driven action. There’s a wide range of football games available, most of which simulate either actual play or football management.

This market is set to take an interesting turn early next year when Sega, publisher of the massively successful Football Manager series, releases Football Manager Live, an online multiplayer version. Meanwhile we’ll be treated to a new release of the excellent Pro Evolution Soccer later this year. This formerly console-only game is hugely popular thanks to its realistic feel and easy-to-master gameplay – but will nonetheless face stiff competition from its main rival, EA Sports’ FIFA 08.

With Windows Vista, the beautiful game has never looked so good.