Blogger Spotlight: Chris Linnell, The Boot Room

Founded in 2012, The Boot Room has steadily grown its fan base and now has over 300,000 readers per month. From the English Premier League to the Spanish La Liga, The Boot Room provides all of the latest news from across the world. In this spotlight Chris Linnell, founder of The Boot Room chats to us about using the blog as a platform for aspiring journalists, the challenges of driving user engagement, as well as his predictions for #Euro2016.

Can you tell us a little about The Boot Room and why people should read your blog? The Boot Room is a football blog site, created by, and written for the fans of Europe’s most popular competitions, with a particular focus on the English football leagues. We provide a platform for aspiring journalists, all of whom bring their own unique opinions and style of writing – which makes for a wide variety of interesting content.

What has been a fun and interesting campaign you have recently worked on? What was different about it? We’ve really enjoyed the Euro 2016 build-up over the past few weeks and the writing team has been really involved in producing creative content prior to the tournament – it has been great to see. You really cannot beat the hysteria produced by a summer tournament. Aside from that, we’ve enjoyed running our series of interviews with lower league footballers. This is something we are really hoping to push on with next season.

How do you use social media to promote and share content? What are the challenges? The main challenge is driving user engagement and turning a large following into interaction and traffic on the site itself. Social media can be so powerful if used correctly, as many other sites have proven, but it takes a certain level of creativity to get it right. This is an area we are still developing at The Boot Room. We are a very long way off where we want to be in the social media space.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? It is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires you to really put the hours in if you wish to become established, but the rewards are more than worth it when they come to fruition. If you love football and have a strong opinion on the game, the only challenge is getting it down on paper in a coherent fashion. When you’ve mastered that skill, you’re good to go.

Do you feel bloggers need to be compensated for the work they do? In an ideal world, all bloggers would get paid to write. However, the market has become so saturated, with so many people running their own small blog, owning a Twitter account, or contributing to larger sites. The competition for paid roles outside of the actual profession of journalism is very, very competitive. Ultimately, only the very best writers get paid to do what they love.

What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? As most will know, with the summer transfer window always comes a busy period for football blogs and this year will be little different. From start to finish, we intend to provide our readers with all the best analysis and opinion on goings on. Aside from that, we will just be waiting in anticipation for the new season, which we hope is going to be just as exciting as the last. With a number of big managerial changes in the Premier League, in particular, we cannot wait to see what unfolds.

Your predictions of Euro 2016? Personally, I think it’s hard to overlook tournament hosts France, or current world champions Germany. For me, they have by far the strongest squads this time round. However, if I had to pick an outsider, I really like the look of Austria. They were excellent throughout qualification and they boast a number of talented players, including the likes of Bayern Munich’s David Alaba and Leicester City’s Christian Fuchs.