Friday Freebie: NonLeagueHQ

Founder Matt Cooke talks us through one of the best stat sites covering Steps 1-6 and the British Isles itself in non-league football

Welcome to this week’s Friday Freebie. A guest piece this week from one of my newest subscriber’s Matt Cooke. Matt runs the excellent stat site NonLeagueHQ which cover a name of great statistics from the National League down to the County Leagues.

Here is the story of how Matt began the site and it’s progress to where it is today, enjoy!

NonLeagueHQ - How the Stats Came to Life! 

My name is Matt Cooke, and I created the idea behind NonLeagueHQ. Trevor has kindly asked if I could write a blog piece for him, and as writing is a bit of a labour of love for me, I jumped at the chance, thanks Trev! With that in mind, welcome to the story behind the creation of our site, and its small, but growing presence on social media! This blog will take you through the journey of how the idea was born, the development process, and the exciting plans we have for the future. Whether you're a football enthusiast, a budding developer, or simply curious about how websites come to life, I hope you find this story inspiring and insightful.

Like many great ideas, the concept for my non league football statistics website started with a passion. But let's give credit where it's due: the global pandemic. Yes, thank you, COVID-19! Stuck at home, bored out of my mind, and my normal busy life ground to a halt, I had nothing to distract me, I found myself with an abundance of time and an urge to do something productive.

As a lifelong football fan, I spent countless hours poring over match statistics, and back when I was a kid, I used to create my own. With my A4 notepad, a pen and a dice, I would recreate match results (5 and 6 on the dice being zero goals), the passion for stats was always there, so during the first lockdown I had this ‘great’ idea! 

Where to start? Well, as I said, I’m a big non league fan, and I support a non league club, Woking FC, and I felt that level of football, and especially below that didn’t (and still doesn’t) get the recognition or exposure that it deserves. So, in order to build something that would help create this added exposure, I had to start from scratch. 

This all coincided with the beginning of the 2020/21 season, and without knowing that this was the season that wouldn’t make it to Christmas, I opened up my spreadsheet and began recording all results from steps one to six. League tables and goalscorers followed as well as a few other basic stats for that season, and I wanted to share them, so in October 2020 I opened up a Twitter account, and started posting away. As we all know, that season was eventually curtailed into the new year, and whilst football had stopped, it gave me the chance to start the next stage of this idea, the website, and for that I needed help.

Having looked through many free website platforms, I opted for Wix, an easy to use, drag and drop site, that had all the functions I needed, but eventually the limitations would show, and mean looking at other options, but more on that later.

So, as I said, I needed help. I put a post on Twitter, and I’m so lucky that my right hand man on the site, Andy Forward, saw this post, as he’s been amazing ever since coming on board. At the time, Andy was the finance man at a club in step 5 in the non league system, and had helped build the clubs website using Wix, so I gave him the keys to my site, and off he went. Between us (mainly Andy), we managed to link all the spreadsheets to live tables on the site, freeing up more time for putting together all the other stats that have been posted over the previous few seasons. Each new stat created is now automated upon entering match results, allowing us to be even more creative with the statistics being produced. My personal favourites are the overall non league scorers, which Amersham Town forward, Jake Tabor stormed to the title, as well as the brilliant colour graphs showing form throughout the season for all 48 step 1-6 divisions. It’s also great to see the clubs interacting with these posts going out, as it goes back to those teams enjoying some little extra exposure that they didn’t have before. One of my main aims when starting off this entire project. 

During last season, we also decided that we had the time to have a section for the Welsh and Scottish non league scene, so on the current website, you’ll also see a area on both of these, and although we didn’t get as much time as we wanted for each of these, that is something that we’re looking to improve next season.

Talking of next season, things are changing at NLHQ. As previously mentioned, we’ve reached our limitations with the Wix site, and we’ve decided to take the next step and move on to a new site platform. It’s still in development, but it’s live, so please take a look at www.nonleaguehq.com when you’ve got a chance. It’s got, or will have, all the features our previous site had, but we’ve sharpened it all up, including the data entry elements that happen behind the scenes, as well have live stats on the go as the season progresses for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Not only that, but we’ve decided to add a new exciting element to the site, and that is the growing presence of the Women's game. Steps 1-6 of the Women’s pyramid will be on the site, along with the same stats you see in the mens section of the site. A very exciting addition for us.

I’ll be honest, if it wasn’t for the restraint of Andy, there'd be loads of added elements to the site, way beyond our time capabilities, so I’m thankful that he’s the sensible side of our operation. I’ll try again next year, and see if I can slip something new onto our site. During last season, we were also very lucky to have the assistance of Ian, better known as ‘TheRavens 12th Man, on X. He’s been key to ensuring that the Welsh and Scottish pages were kept up to date, especially with all the fixture rearranging due to the crazy weather throughout the winter period.  

It’s been so much fun putting this all together, not only for my love of statistics, but I learnt so much about a lot of clubs that I previously had never heard of, and that’s what we intend to bring to other people that enjoy what we do. Not only that, for all the other dedicated non league sites and social media accounts out there, they’re all doing a great job at bringing more exposure to this area of the game. 

As always, we’re looking for anyone that would be keen on helping us out and be part of our team, it might even allow me to sneak some more stuff past Andy. So if that is of any interest to you, please get in touch with one of us. Otherwise, we’d love to hear your feedback, good or bad, as we’re always looking to improve our content.

As stated before, we’ve got a new site - www.nonleaguehq.com - please check it out. It is live, BUT still in development. Let us know your thoughts.

X: @nonleaguehq1 FB: NonLeagueHQ IG: nonleaguehq