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In 2005 Championship Manager fanboys were divided by a new franchise called Football Manager. These new FM fanboys took to the internet to express their love for the game by setting up fansites dedicated to providing discussion, tips and downloads for other FM fans. At this point the competition was so rife and the mentality so driven that you had numerous rival sites competing for your attention. Whilst this is still true today, fansites are ran with skewed mentality and it's this change which has lowered the bar of expectation and the standard of what is produced on the Scene.
It was how the vintage sites generated attention that set the bar exceedingly high for the latter generations of fansites and fansite owners. In the early years, until late 2007, you had a exceptional array of high quality mainsites littered with content, articles and discussion. This buzz was then transferred into forums where repeat visitors became members of the community and got to know each other, forming strong bonds with their respective sites.
Not unlike today, there was a lot of intense rivalry. It is this rivalry between fansites which has spawned a skewed mentality behind the scenes of these fansites and subsequently the following years had a rapid decline in standard. The enthusiasm at the older fansites either died off or the new generation of site owners completely misread the concept and dynamics of running a fansite. Everything had become about competition and people became obsessed with success, producing the best site for their members and being the centre of attention. This was always an undercurrent, even from day one but over time people began to associate success with popularity; member numbers, post numbers and hits became the central focus of the fansite and sacrificed everything to increase these meaningless digits.
Whilst this can be easily dismissed as opinion you have the ability to hit the Community button above where you will see for yourself that all but a handful of the English fansites are producing mainsite content and it appears that an even smaller amount actually focus on literature, guides or articles. We've become stuck in a world where templated player guides are being considered as quality content and the opinion of the editor has been lost in the forum, thus resulting in fansites either dabbling in a multitude of content types in a bid to good at everything (and executing it at a much poorer standard due to them being too thinly spread) or people heading off into the blogosphere to create their own homage to Football Manager.
Case and point below - the evolution of the Scene represented by two of the kings - Sortitoutsi and FM-Britain followed by the Scene today represented by The Away Stand and a few other sites.
The first image is Sortitoutsi in 2005, then it was a site in it's peak; it provided new material almost every day at one point and it was always interesting reading. The second image is Sortitoutsi in 2006. Almost one year later it's become embrawled in the 'Scene Wars' - lots of petty fighting, even making the main page as news but the sites were still competing for the top spot via content and offerings to it's members and guests via the mainsite. The last image is almost four years on, today in fact. As you can see it's merely a beautiful holding page, which it's to remain as the site is now fully focussed on it's graphical roots - it's a shame that they're not utilising what is undoubtedly the best resource they have but it's understandable if they're to maintain the high quality production of graphics which they produce.
As you can see above we have FM-Britain who I've followed along the same timeline. From day one FM-Britain have had direction and never lost it. They're the only site who produce content at the high standard they had on opening day and they're the only site who still focus on filling their canvas with literature. This for me, is the true measure of a fansite and it's success; it's not the most active forum in the world, it's a tight-knit community of old men in truth, but they're the epitome of a time when the editor called the shots and not the administrator.
Below is the new new Scene, an example of the changes which have slowly seeped in from the 2006 Scene Wars - the point in time which started the chain of events you saw in the Sortitoutsi timeline.
The Away Stand is a new site which is a great example to showcase this desperate for success mentality which has spiralled out of control since mid 2007.
Looking above you will notice that The Away Stand have an active mainsite, if you've read above or visit their site you'll notice that 70% of their content is either player reviews or site news about the forums, awards or graphics (things that mean nothing to readers, only members). They do make articles on occasion but only a small majority of that content would hold up to the standard FM-Britain have been producing for years or sites like Throw-In, FM Old Timers and Susie used to produce on a very regular basis. If you actually look at the setup you can see that every single piece of mainsite content is linked into the forums, thus making the site nothing more than a portal - which is unfortunately what it's come to when you visit the vast majority of sites other than FM-Britain or FM-View.
As seen above, the perfect example of what I'm saying. The page is filled to the maximum as soon as you open it, with a sales pitch designed to lure people into registering on the forum. They've completely failed to grasp that fansites are about mainsites and not forums, we'd call them fanforums otherwise. It's not just The Away Stand who fall victim to this desperate need for success; only concerned with the number of users they attract each day or networking their social media/Google rankings until they're at a point where the quality of the content no longer matters because an active forum at the top of Google will always be successfully perceived as being good.
Believe it or not, The Away Stand is probably one of the best examples of an active mainsite but sadly this mainsite is ran by forum administrators and not the editor/writer of the old Scene. It's not hard to understand that administrators want their forums active, it's the natural expectation and goal when you run a forum but this mentality is costing member's time as they're forced to examine content on forums (which should be used for commentary and discussion of the subject covered in the article) instead of an easy to read, to the point article hosted in an archived site. Sadly, it is nothing more than a desperate attempt at keeping visitors and members on-site and it's seriously affecting the quality or the quantity of material you can find on Football Manager subjects. It's an absolute nightmare having to scour a spam filled forum for accurate information on a subject. Still, they and the other sites guilty of the same stance, fail to see that it's hurting them more than aiding them - sure they're getting sign-ups but how many people would they get to their site if it practised in being more faithful to the content rather than the glory of running a bustling forum?
This is the major difference between the quality of sites in 2005/2006 and sites in the last 3 to 4 years. Sure it's not so different in terms of fighting, drama and discussion but it's the death of the editor which has really forced people to look elsewhere for information. People may sign up to forums but rarely does a newbie return and that's because they don't want to signup in the first place; but they're forced to because all this sacred FM information is housed in forums - in a desperate ploy to get more members and activity; which ironically is the one reason why people don't come back, because the forum doesn't have the information they want - because the site isn't ran by a man who's an editor, it's ran by an administrator who's information is hidden amongst tiers of useless posts and not showcased where everyone can have immediate access to it. Instead people end up heading to Google and that's when they see the blogosphere - home to the ousted editor.
Vintage Scene - home to the editor, blogging and discussion via a forum.
Modern Scene - home to the administrator and a portal to the site forum.
** exception to the generics of the modern Scene - home to a few vintage minded editors.
Blogosphere - home to the outest editor.
So to surmise my entire article, Vintage > *.
Pretty good read 
