GrandOldTeam is 10 years old today.
Ten years. It’s a long time…
From our small team of volunteers – thank you all for your tremendous support of GrandOldTeam over the years and for making GOT what it is.
GrandOldTeam began on the 5th February 2007 with the intention of providing a ‘sound’ forum, a user-friendly online platform which would allow Evertonians from across the world to log on to and discuss the Toffees – and anything else for that matter!
In our first year, 950 Evertonians made 97,810 posts in our forum. 10 years later, over 500 of these still continue to login to GrandOldTeam, joined by over 30,000 other Evertonians who have now contributed over 5 million posts.
Every single year we’ve had increasing number of Evertonians visiting and engaging across our platform. We now average between 8 and 12 million page visits per month with over 270,000 social media fans and 30,000 active forum members.
While our aim was never to become the biggest Everton community, our priority from day one has always remained the same – to endeavour to Nil Satis Nisi Optimum in providing the very best place on the web for fans worldwide to congregate to discuss Everton Football Club.
Along the way, we’ve won countless awards for doing just that – winning the best football forum in the UK on numerous occasions. More importantly – in our ten years as a community we’ve raised thousands of pounds for charity, from Lucas’ Legacy to Alder Hey, to pioneering work on mental health in our forum – although we try our best to avoid directly representing Evertonians, when we do by inadvertently, we ensure we do so to the highest standards.
We really hope to be here for a few more years yet. It will be a challenge – escalating costs, legalities around access to basic club material, media companies operating under the pretense of genuine fan sites with the infrastructure to out-muscle the genuine fan site and above all – time and resource make operating a fan site a challenge. We’ve got some way to pass the legendary Blue Kipper’s 15 years…
Thank you all for your tremendous support over the last ten years. Here is to another ten…
It’s a GrandOldTeam to support…