Welcome to the Arseblog News Arsenal Women Newsletter

The show Musk go on...

Hello there! Every season I like to review our output on Arseblog News when it comes to Arsenal Women and we always try to add, change and tweak things where possible. Twitter has always been my / our main way of reaching our AWFC audience but, the truth is, changes Elon Musk has made to the site have meant tweets with external links are being strangled by the algorithm.

There are good and bad points to Twitter’s decision to move away from being a primary content driver but I won’t go into that here. So we are launching a free Arsenal Women newsletter which I will circulate roughly weekly. Clearly, we will link back to content from Arseblog News from the week so we have another way of reaching our audience, but I will add musings from the world of Arsenal Women, maybe some anecdotes here and there from times past and from covering games in the press area.

In truth, Twitter is also becoming a little more hostile in the women’s football space and it’s increasingly not worth the hassle of being ratioed into oblivion by the high court of woso Twitter. At Arseblog, (we’re called ‘Arseblog’ ffs, do you know how often I have to laugh that off when collecting accreditation at away grounds?!) we have always been clear that we make content for Arsenal fans. I very much consider my role in this space to try to act as a conduit between the club and the fans where I can and to ask the questions of the coach and the players that fans want the answers to.

But we have also never taken ourselves too seriously, we are fans too after all. And, to repeat, we are called ‘Arseblog.’ I guess trying to maintain that balance between being professional, serious and reliable but retaining our personality with it is one of the more interesting challenges for us as the game grows and our image with our women’s coverage becomes more more distinct in the women’s football space. Plenty to ponder there.

But anyway, enough navel gazing. The WSL kicks off this weekend and we have gone content ker-azy. On Monday, we published our 2023-24 player profiles with every single player in the squad profiled, on Tuesday we went in-depth on all five of Arsenal’s summer signings (Amanda Ilestedt, Cloe Lacasse, Alessia Russo, Laia Codina and Kyra Cooney-Cross). On Wednesday, I got together with scout and analyst Blair Newman on the Arsenal Women Arsecast Season Review episode where we assessed the shape of the squad ahead of this campaign and took listener questions on the defence, Miedema’s re-integration, Gio, Lina Hurtig and Arsenal’s expectations this season.

On Thursday, I went through and picked out three themes for the season which, in my view, will probably recur throughout the campaign. On Friday, we are at London Colney for open training and Jonas Eidevall’s pre-Liverpool press conference and we will have a match preview for the Liverpool game on the site on Saturday. By now, you probably know there will be more good news this week too which we will be across. We will do all the usual post-match stuff too with full quotes from Jonas Eidevall’s post-match press conference and the usual in-depth analysis piece with graphics from the ever fabulous Miedemastuff.

This week, the club also released their bespoke women’s away kit, as Arseblog News exclusively revealed they would earlier this year. I am caught between really liking it but really thinking a 39-year-old man with my, ahem, ‘physique’ probably has no business wearing it. I wanted to buy one for my three-year-old daughter but, alas, doesn’t look like Stella and adidas have made a toddler’s version available. Oh well.

It was always my understanding that the original Stella McCartney range from the spring of 2022 was a precursor to a bespoke women’s away kit and I think it’s a great step. It’s bold (I am not just talking about the design here) because it declares that the women’s team is a thriving commercial outfit in its own right, I really hope we start to see more bespoke Arsenal Women merchandise available through official channels. This team are regularly selling 50,000 + tickets for matches now, plenty of people either support the women’s team and not the men’s or else want to demonstrate their support for the women’s team. It’s one of the reasons that shirt customisation is so big in the women’s football space.

Until next week…