Note from the SFG team
.
Greetings, and welcome to the Sandals for Goalposts guide to the African Cup of Nations 2015 in Equatorial Guinea, as brought to you by our crack team of #AfricanFootballExperts.
Firstly, we'd all like to thank you for even getting to the stage where you're reading this. If you even have a smidgen of the interest that we have in African football, you must be pretty damn excited about the continent's premier tournament kick off in a matter of days. Hopefully this will be the lighthouse the guides you through the choppy seas of African football, and give you all you need to boost your hipster knowledge and learn to love it as much as we do.
For AFCON 2015, we wanted to go the extra mile. Sandals for Goalposts has really done well over the last couple of years. It may have only been around since January 2012, but with the bumper load of tournaments we've had to enjoy - two AFCONs and a World Cup since we started three years ago - support for for what we do has grown and grown. The story of our formation is for another day but sometimes we all start crying because we never even got this far in our dreams.
We really get the feeling that people believe in what we are doing, and that they respect our thoughts and trust our knowledge on the sport we love.
thoughts and trust our knowledge on the sport we love. So much so,that members of the SFG team were even scouted out for freelance work on the African teams at the recent World Cup. Without your support this would not have been possible, so for this we will eternally be grateful.
I guess part of our reasoning for doing this e-magazine was so that African football can be covered in a way that mainstream media tends to shy away from. Too often it is glossed over as no more than a sidenote; a nagging irritant that gets in the way of European football; a basket-case continent flitting from chaos to calamity.
What we want to you see is what we see. African football embodies what so many people fell in love with football for originally. The unpredictability; the entertainment; the feeling that this is something different and exciting, to break up the never-ending outrage and argument. This is football with a smile on its face. It may be chaos, but it is beautiful, beautiful chaos.
One of the big debates we had amongst the team was whether to charge for this. In the end, we decided to give it away for free, with the option of donating to the site.