‘Internet is not for the Tajik language’? A crowdsourced soccer blog marks 10 years · Global Voices
Tajik stamp commemorating the 2006 World Cup in Germany, for which Tajikistan did not qualify. CC2.0.
When I founded the first ever online platform covering Tajik football in the Tajik language in 2008, no football club had any official online presence. Local media in my former Soviet Central Asian country, whether Russian language or Tajik language, covered the results of the games in the local league only sporadically. At that time, if you had looked for the Tajik football league table online, you might not have found it anywhere.
Ten years on, “Football of Tajikistan” continues to serve my country and my people as a reliable source of information and space for discussion about the beautiful game. Moreover, this rare online initiative has now reached a new level thanks to its followers on social media.
From WordPress to Facebook with a little the help from my friends
The hunger for information on Tajik football and especially in the Tajik language was immediately obvious— less than two weeks after coming online on May 12, 2008, the blog celebrated its 1,000th visit. While that might not seem like much, in Tajikistan, where Internet connections are slow and expensive, it's significant. Even today, privately funded news websites struggle to get similar numbers of visitors.
The blog's success was rooted in the fact that it was providing information online that even the Tajik league's clubs were not offering. As far as I know, the first football club with an online presence in Tajikistan was FC Vakhsh in April 2010. The club website was administered by someone I taught how to use WordPress. Incredibly, up until March 2012, the Tajik Football Federation itself had no website.
At the World Cup in Russia this summer, Central Asia will be supporting <PERSON>
“Football of Tajikistan” provided a full table after each match day, including information on goal scorers; documented the progress of Tajikistan's national and club sides at different Asian competitions; pioneered polls and brought BBC-style live text from matches between the football world's powerhouses to a local audience through translations into Tajik.
Football is popular across Tajikistan. Photo by <PERSON>. CC 2.0.
The main challenge the blog faced in the early days was publishing accurate, timely information about games that were not covered anywhere else. That is where I have a confession to make—I had volunteers. 910
Many of them!
Professional sports reporters writing for local newspapers and ordinary football fans-turned-citizen journalists were my ears and eyes at stadiums across the country. Every weekend, as soon as the referee's whistle ended a match, thousands of interested readers would know where to go to see the result, especially as the newspapers would sometimes only go to print the following Thursday.
Gradually, the blog added in-demand analytical products to its bread-and-butter match reports. The “Futboldon” (“football connoisseur”) section that allowed readers to compete on predictions of outcomes of domestic and foreign games was especially popular. The site also offered a glossary of key football terms translated into Tajik. During the Soviet period, these terms were mostly rendered in the Union's lingua franca, Russian.
After five years of hyperactive blogging, however, I found that I had a shrinking amount of free time to commit to updates. With family and other work commitments, I needed others to shoulder the data entry burden.
Luckily, the rising popularity of Facebook in Tajikistan at the time provided a readymade solution to the problem. I created a group, which is now administered by <PERSON>. Although I have never met <PERSON> in person, I have watched him gradually grow into our community's most important voice. Somehow finding time outside his day job as an accountant at a local hospital, <PERSON> added new administrators to the group, raised engagement rates with group posts to 1,000 people a day and represented our group on television talk shows covering local sports. He is one prominent example of how the blog turned into an incubator for fresh football journalism talent. Two other former administrators used the blog as a platform to launch themselves as professional sports journalists.
Taking the Tajik language online
The Tajik language is the state language of Tajikistan. Prior to 1917 and the Bolshevik revolution, the language was rendered in a version of the Persian alphabet used for fellow Indo-Iranian languages spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. The conversion of the language to Cyrillic from 1930, after a brief period where the Latin alphabet was used, distanced Tajik speakers from the rest of the Indo-Iranian world. 148