Ten Years Of The Stacey West: Thank You

Ten years ago today, I sat down to write something about Lincoln City’s upcoming trip to Tranmere Rovers.

It was the first piece of fresh content on a site I had decided to name The Stacey West. I’d been writing about Lincoln on my personal site for a while, but after a long bath on the evening of March 21st, 2016, I decided it was time to put everything together into a single site.

I chose the name The Stacey West not just to honour the two Lincoln fans who lost their lives at Bradford, Bill Stacey and Jim West, but also as a homage to the end of the ground I grew up in. I should perhaps have gone for The Railway End, but that end will forever be The Stacey West. That’s where I spent my late teens, the seminal years of any football fan’s life. If it gets you then, it’ll stay with you forever.

I started writing to channel my Imps support. Having been the mascot for 16 years, I always had something to do on a match day, and when I got back to attending fixtures in 2015/16 (I never really stopped, but didn’t go every week between November 2013 and December 2015), I wanted an outlet. I was frustrated at work, hating my career, and my downtime was wasted in front of the PlayStation display.

I wrote sporadically, occasionally fired up by something I saw on Lincoln City Banter, and that Facebook page helped spread my writing. I’m still on it, I still share some of my work there, and I have to credit it and the admins who run it for helping me grow.

I never intended the site to grow. I never thought it could. We were a mid-table National League team, and when I first put finger to keyboard, the thought of us maybe being on the cusp of the Championship one day was madness. Yet, within months of my starting the site, Danny and Nicky Cowley were appointed.

2016/17 is a season we’ll all look back on fondly, one I can’t wait to cover, week by week, next season. It seems like yesterday that I got caught out against Solihull Moors and had to queue to get in. We suddenly had 3,000 supporters, then 4,000, and as the Lincoln Loco gathered momentum, I saw the club reborn before my eyes.

I’ve been lucky with my timing, because I documented it all. It became my primary focus, which is why I left three jobs in the first year of writing. I didn’t care about selling kitchens, or bricks and blocks, or kids play equipment. I wanted to write about Lincoln, and when a company in Cleethorpes ended my probation period early, it wasn’t because I was awful. It was maybe because I spent my last afternoon writing about Tranmere (again). They let me go, and I went straight home and rebuilt the site, changing to the current site, and adding adverts.

That was the catalyst for me to pack in working my old career and start writing. I used adverts on the SW for a while, then got freelance work, which meant they came off. Within a few months, we’d won the National League. There is no doubt that those first months were huge in helping the site establish itself. Danny and Nicky read my work, as there was little coverage back then, and that legitimacy helped.

Into the league, and Terry Hibberd, then commercial manager, got me involved in writing interviews for the programme, which gave me access to the players. The site was always my focus, and award nominations followed. In 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 I attended different awards, at Old Trafford, The Etihad, and the Tower of London. The site was here to stay.

After that, along came Ben and the podcast, Bubs and the photos and a host of great contributors. The site got a leg up during the Colwey era, and has been fairly well established since. Numbers have grown across all platforms, and we’ve had some standout moments. Live shows with Michael Appleton and Mark Kennedy were great, culminating in us doing one in front of 200 people. We’ve helped launch the kit and conducted some great interviews with players and staff, past and present.

At the centre of it all, you. The reader. You keep coming back, asking questions for articles, giving me ideas, offering to help. There are some talented writers, young and old, who contribute now, and the Stacey West isn’t just me. It’s mine, of course, but it’s also Ben, Chris, Charlie an Emily. It’s Stu on the socials, who you don’t see, but who is incessant with his work. It’s Malcolm, Kyle and Kyle. It’s David Ward, covering the non-league for those who like that niche. It’s everyone who comments and gets involved.

Patreon has grown slowly, and we’re not even just a site anymore. It’s a website, yes. We do digital media, yes. But we’re also a community, a group of like-minded people who sponsor a player, debate and discuss on Discord, support each other and meet up. It’s so good.

It’s also my full-time job now. After growing slowly, but surely, over a decade, I took the plunge in November and took the site full-time. Losing one of my biggest influences, my Dad, was awful, but it also spurred me on to try and make a proper go of this, covering is, and our league. Now, my work is driven by his memory, by those times he let his guard down and told me how proud he was of the work I do and of the site.

All this, because ten years ago, I wanted to write about Lincoln and Tranmere, and felt it was probably not right that it came after an article I did reviewing a video game, so I lumped everything together as the Stacey West. That’s my origin story. That’s how this community came to be.

Where it goes next is up to you.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to us, and thank you.

Here’s to another decade.