The Beef: Steven Chicken

An interview with the man revolutionising football coverage at Huddersfield Town

For a long time now I’ve considered myself football media-adjacent. My first football writing was published in 2003. I was a football blogger when football blogging was a thing, and I was a podcaster too.

My work has almost always been self-published and available for free. I’ve done a couple of commissions and appeared on national radio, but for the most part I’ve pursued an entirely separate career while some of the people I’ve met – and indeed some people I know well – have gone on to succeed as journalists.

As a football supporter and reader with friends in the press, I’ve always been interested in the state of the sports media in England. It’s an industry I’m now part of at the end of the most circuitous route and quite by accident, but one I’ve observed very closely for two decades.

The big shift in that time is the decline of print and the slow, sometimes misguided response of national, regional and local titles who bowled onto the internet believing the traditional advertising model would keep them afloat.

The outcome was newspaper websites drowning in ads, unreadable at times, where the content is a load of old crap when you finally get there precisely because of the need to deliver eyeballs to those advertisers. No wonder things have been difficult.

Local club coverage in newspapers is particularly fascinating. They’re usually hostage to the same business imperatives but the locals continue to offer something worth reading.

For supporters outside the Premier League, the local club reporter is an unmatched source of access to a club. For the club, they’re a conduit to supporters that bigger titles just don’t care enough to provide to any useful degree.

When The Athletic moved into the UK promising all sorts, the game changed. It seemed like almost all of the local newspaper reporters covering the top division and the biggest handful in the second were lured away from print overnight.

That’s an opinion piece for another day. Today, the matter at hand is the pressure that seismic change put upon already struggling but established local and regional titles and how the volatility affecting the businesses that own them gradually led to innovation in club reporting and the green shoots of local sports news decentralisation.

The club whose coverage has been revolutionised at the pointy end of the new?

Huddersfield Town.

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The Beef: Steven Chicken

It was Steven Chicken who took a leap of faith when his role’s redundancy wasn’t so much on the horizon as winging its way to his doorstep in the first-class post.

Chicken covered Huddersfield Town for the Huddersfield Examiner for five years before launching We Are Terriers – a Huddersfield Town Substack offering much of the same coverage and more besides – in December 2023.

“I think people were very pleased that we were continuing, particularly the podcast side of it,” Chicken says.

“The main comment was how readable the site is because there's no ads on it. It goes straight to the email inbox. It's dead easy to read, people really like that. Every newspaper's website now is by necessity just full of ads, all the way through the piece.

Chicken’s route to independence was by no means an easy one. He found his way into football reporting as a freelancer for The Football League Paper and others before grabbing the chance to add Football365 to his roster of clients with both hands. There, the standard and imagination of his work started to build the foundations of the future he’s living today.

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Like Steven Chicken, I’m a freelance football writer with a Substack. Mine doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t even cover the cost of the wear and tear on my keyboard.

I’m also an Editorial Brand Strategy Consultant and I have availability for both that and football content. If you’d like to talk about how I can help your business, contact me directly through my website (linked just above, right there, just up a few lines) and we’ll have a chat.

If you don’t have a business, why not support independent football writing by upgrading to a paid subscription? It’s worth it. You’ll get loads more.

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“I'd been freelancing for about ten years on top of various nine-to-fives and was just reporting on Saturdays. 

“Then Football365 gave me my break, which was brilliant of them. I'm always extremely grateful to Sarah Winterburn for giving me that opportunity, just working weekends for them and the odd evening. I had a weekly column which was massive for helping to build my CV.”

It was during his time at Football365 that I first got to know Chicken and his work. His ability to produce the sort of web-friendly content expected in the industry is present and correct but it was a knack for giving football the side-eye and a willingness to contradict a simplistic consensus that caught my attention.

After a while, he was able to back a truckload of quality writing and reporting up to the offices of the Huddersfield Examiner and bang on the door.

“I worked for the Examiner for five and a half years. It was my first full-time reporting job,” he tells me.

“It was pretty much a standard club reporter job, following them home and away. Going to all the press conferences, interviews, predicted line-ups – all the usual staples that you'd get from a club reporter at a local newspaper.”

It’s here that my interest in the minutiae of the football media kicks in and I probe further in search of the details. Where do those staples actually come from? How do these routine items, usually taken for granted, come about? As a writer of several stripes, Chicken has a keen sense of the distinctions between them.

“It's very much about depth of knowledge not breadth of knowledge. I’ve gone back to freelance for Football365 and at FourFourTwo. For those roles, breadth of knowledge is more important. You need to know a little bit about every club and a little bit about a lot of players so you can have an informed opinion on them.

“The more Premier League you watch, the more you do get a little bit of depth over time. But I’ve seen, say, Manchester United several times this season but I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head that this player’s had an injury for two months or that player was really poor at the start of the season.

“That’s the domain of fans, obviously, but also the club reporter, the people who are there every week and watch all the games. They’re at every press conference. That’s the meat-and-two-veg part of the role.”

“Any local club reporter will tell you that the relationship with the club is one you need to look after. But that’s not the same as saying you’re an extra part of the PR machine for the club or you’re an extension of the club website because that’s the last thing you want to be.”

The words that end up on the page are only part of the job. As the Huddersfield reporter on the Examiner and now under the auspices of We Are Terriers, Chicken’s efforts – like those of any club reporter – are as much about being the person best qualified to write them. Local football news lives and dies on access and trust between the club, its reporter and the supporters.

“I always saw my role as having the fans on one side, and the club on the other,” says Chicken. “I’m kind of representing the interests of both, sometimes against one another. But I’m making sure both sides have a voice in the media.”

Since Chicken has been covering the club, Huddersfield have had changes in ownership, a string of managerial appointments and ups and downs on the pitch, to say the least. How does he balance those responsibilities when the people on either side of him are at odds?

“If the club has made a decision that isn’t going to be popular, they might point me in the direction of the reason why. They’re not expecting me to say that there’s a reason for it, so it’s fine. They just want to be sure that if I do have to write something critical and reflect the frustrations of the fans, at least I have the facts and they can be represented in the piece.”

Chicken’s mastery of those dynamics and proficiency in writing Town content that combined the unique insight of the club reporter with his wit and analytical brain made him one of the most respected local football journalists in England, notably among his own audience.

That, along with the club’s recognition of his value to them when the time came to embrace independence, became the catalyst for the success of We Are Terriers. Football supporters need dedicated local coverage and there’s no better fit than Chicken.

“Huddersfield Town have stayed very business as usual with me, which is actually the most supportive thing they could have done,” he says when asked how his altered status affected his relationship with the Terriers.

“At other clubs, they might have said I wasn’t at the local paper anymore so when you come to games you can apply as a freelancer, so you don’t really get the level of access you had before because you’re less valuable to us.

“I’m still at every game. On the day we launched, they gave me the chairman to interview. I’ve interviewed him again since then. I interviewed the sporting director for our podcast during the January transfer window last year. I went out to Austria for pre-season and was given access to that, not training but all the friendlies, and an exclusive interview with Michael Duff, the head coach, after they appointed him.”

“I’m not a Town fan. So, although I’m invested in them, I like to think I can hold some measure of objectivity about things that maybe sometimes a fan site can’t. I think clubs will always be more likely to give access to professional journalists who know how that relationship works, whereas many would be reluctant to give too much away to fans.”

When the spectre of redundancy loomed, Chicken set the wheels in motion for a form of local football coverage that’s free from the shackles of search and audience-first almost to a fault.

“Unfortunately, in journalism, I think you’re only ever a couple of years away from the next round of redundancies. Across the industry, everyone you speak to at various titles across the country has the same sort of concerns.

“I’d always had in the back of my mind the question of what I’d do when it caught up to me. One thing we had at the Examiner that I think did very, very well for us was a podcast. It was actually started before I got there by Raj Bains who now works for the club. We brought that back with me and David Hartrick. 

“Getting Dave on board was the best decision I ever made because he’s a really, really good broadcaster. The podcast punched above its weight for the size of club that it covered, so we always knew that we had an audience there, if and when the day came, and we figured at least some of them might follow us across.”

Follow across they did. We Are Terriers washed its face right from the start and just kept on going. It became clear to Chicken that the level and variety of coverage he could offer would be better than he’d imagined.

Away games had been on the chopping block. No problem. They’re feasible. Overnight stays are possible when they’re needed. The freelancers who work with Chicken are compensated and that means the podcast can live on and Huddersfield Town’s women’s team can enjoy coverage from We Are Terriers too.

Before joining the Examiner, Chicken was a volunteer press officer for Doncaster Belles. His passion for women’s football remains and he knows exactly the challenges faced by clubs. Giving Town Women a voice is important to him.

“I’d always wanted to do it at the Examiner. When I first started there we had two club writers because it was a two-person job. I was working with Mel Booth, who’d been there for 35 years and he’s a bit of a journalism icon. You can’t go anywhere in the country and someone doesn’t know Mel Booth.

“But it became a one-person job and that limits what you can do at a time when they’re trying to protect jobs. The men’s team keeps the numbers up. 

“A big problem we had at the Belles was marketing. The club was run by volunteers and there were very few full-time staff and those they did have were rightly focused on the football side. 

“I don’t pretend that We Are Terriers covering the women’s team is going to double their attendances or anything but I would like to think that having a bit of exposure that’s landing in people’s inboxes will help in at least some small way.”

Thanks to the loyalty of his readers and listeners, Chicken was able to bring in journalism student Arthur Difford, who covers the women’s team in depth. We Are Terriers sponsors the training kit of the Huddersfield Town Women Under-14s. The man at the top is eager to do more.

“There are fantastic fan titles out there, really good ones – things like Terrier Spirit and And He Takes That Chance do a brilliant job in fan media. But it’s a slightly different job to being at the club to do press conferences and getting to know people and building relationships.”

To achieve that, We Are Terriers must hold the attention of a paying audience. I ask how the site will meet the challenge of keeping those subscribers after the initial enthusiasm on launch day. The key, says Chicken, is that he has enough control to shape the product around demand.

“The club website is great. Their YouTube has every press conference live, so if fans want that before and after games they can get that there. The Examiner and the Yorkshire Post still cover the club but maybe not in as much depth as I would because that’s not their model.

“So a lot of the usual information is out there and I don’t want to charge people for that. It’d be daft to even try. We’ve focused on depth being the USP of a club journalist. I can focus on quality more than quantity. We had that ethos right from the very beginning. We’re not going to charge people for something they can get for free somewhere else.”