The concourse-honest rules
We’ll keep this short, because you’re here to talk football, not read the small print.
The Concourse is the home for your lot — your club, your country, your people — the way the concourse at the ground is before kick-off. It’s where you celebrate, where you mourn a relegation, where you reminisce about a player nobody else remembers the way you do, where you argue till midnight and come back the next morning to do it again. Football is the best and worst thing most of us have, and this is the place to feel all of it out loud.
So the one idea this whole thing is built on is simple: this is how fans actually talk, and you shouldn’t have to pretend otherwise to use it.
You can be made up about a last-minute winner. You can be heartbroken and say so. You can say a player had a shocking game, that a signing’s been a disaster, that the manager’s lost the dressing room, that a pundit’s been talking nonsense for years. You can swear about a result that’s gutted you. None of that is a problem to us. That’s football.
What we won’t have is poison dressed up as banter. There’s a line, and it’s not a fussy one:
Have a go at what someone did. Don’t go after who they are.
Slaughter the performance, the decision, the tactics, the ownership — fair game. But the moment it turns into a slur, a threat, going after someone’s race or sexuality or religion, digging up where they live, or whipping up real-world harm, you’ve stopped talking football and started being the problem. That’s where we step in.
So, plainly:
This is welcome here
- The joy. The grief. The happy tears and the gallows humour.
- Strong opinions, including ones most people think are mad
- Criticism of players, managers, refs, owners, pundits
- Reminiscing, arguing, winding up your mates, falling out and making up
- Proper fan language. We’re grown-ups.
- Heated disagreement. That’s the whole point.
This isn’t, ever
- Racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious hatred — slurs of any kind
- Threats of violence
- Targeted harassment — pile-ons, going after one person again and again
- Doxxing — posting someone’s address, workplace, private details
- Pretending to be someone you’re not
- Anything calling for real harm to a real person
A couple of house things. This is a football forum, not social media — we’re here for the game, the matches, the players, the arguments that come out of them. The wider political ding-dong you can have on every other corner of the internet; in here, keep it about the football. You’ll also never catch us putting a price tag on a player — transfer fees, wages, contract values, you won’t see those in anything we post. That’s our rule for ourselves, not for you: you can moan about the £25m flop who can’t trap a bag of sand all you like. And women’s football sits shoulder to shoulder with the men’s game here — same billing, not a side room.
If someone crosses the line, report it — there’s a button on every post, and we explain exactly how that works on the Moderation page. If we ever act on something of yours, we’ll tell you what we did and why. We don’t hide your posts and leave you wondering. That’s not how we’d want to be treated, so it’s not how we’ll treat you.
That’s it. Be as passionate as you like. Just don’t be poison.
— Ashley & George