The life of a Lions Content Creator abroad!

'Why the Lions?'

It's a question any Detroit Lions fan in the UK get's asked a lot, by other UK NFL fans and by Lions fans in the US when they come across us for the first time, and the answer is now word for word imprinted in my mind!

'Why do a Podcast about the Lions?'

Now that in itself is a much simpler answer, 'because we like the team and we like talking about them', but it's a much tougher answer to justify, and one that the longer that it goes on the more I find it is on my mind, and is the reason today I stopped doing my College Football Podcast research for tomorrow because I wanted, or maybe needed, to write this today. It's one thing to be a Lions fans and just watch the games over here on TV and cheer along, that's easy! It's a completely different kettle of fish to go online and talk about them.....but that's what happened.....

Just over 4 years ago, Roar Of The Lions UK was born!

It was during COVID, people were searching for things to do in lockdown and it was post in our UK Lions fan group that popped up asking if we wanted to do one, and little did I know just how much that was going to change things for me.

I still to this day remember doing my first podcast with ROTL UK where we did our introductions. I was terrified, back then I wasn't confident. I was shy, maybe a little introverted, and I'm pretty sure I scripted it and I sounded awful doing it. I didn't know that much about American Football in the grand scheme of things so really I was a bad candidate for doing a Lions Podcast. And suitability aside, there are a lot of major problems doing an NFL Podcast in the UK;

• It's not our natural game. We have to sit and study it like a subject cause we have not naturally grown up around it like we have with our football (soccer)

• Target audience. The NFL is still an emerging game in the UK and not the biggest market for a Podcast outside the official NFL stuff, and that's before you factor in that we are a Detroit Lions Podcast, the Lions are well down the list of most supported teams in the UK, so the market over here is tiny

• Believability. If there's no market here, you go where it is....America. But how do you convince an American Detroit Lions fan to spend their limited spare time they may devote to podcasts to give their time to you, a British person talking about an American game?

At first, though hard to adapt to, it was easy work. One hour a week sat on zoom talking a bit about the Lions with 5 of you means minimal effort and prep time and you can kind of just wing it, and it was pre-recorded so no pressure going live. We had no major expectations and we got like 10 listens a week, half of them was us listening back to the show. And so the Lions 2020 season passed this way and we just did our hour a week and that was it. Then the off season came and with content drying up we decided to embark on our first major project, a draft weekend special where we would be live for the whole thing with UK guests from as many other teams as possible. But on the approach the first cracks in our team emerged, and right before the event our original technical guy who was one of the founders of ROTL UK who sorted all the editing and what not just walked out on us days before it happened. None of us were properly trained in running a podcast especially from the technical side so we were left with a conundrum. Do we just give it up and go back to daily life, or do we knuckle down and work our asses off to keep this project going?

We chose the latter....

Matt worked his tail off learning the technical side of things so we could run shows, and I started taking the podcast as more of a serious project than a passing event and knuckled down to start learning as much as I could to become the best panel member I could. We spent basically the entire week before the draft working non-stop to get that set of shows prepared. But with that comes increased time commitment. Learning more technical aspects about positions, researching Lions history, trying to keep up to date on the rest of the NFL, coming up with content creating ideas to make us stand out, it suddenly starts to pile up but I found it was a huge creative well that I enjoyed digging down in to.

It was at the point I started taking a liking to Twitter as well. I discovered it was a creative outlet to banter with other teams, to help the pod grow through recognition, and my new favourite thing to do live tweet streams during Lions games with my own creative twist, and I threw myself into that, something I still do to this day, I've lost count of the amount of hours I've put into it but I genuinely enjoy it.

And then in one particular creative meeting we had just before the beginning of our second season when we were discussing new content ideas, it had been on my mind how difficult it had been in our draft prep to process the amount of information about teams and prospects listening to just a few talking heads with their own views. I wanted to form my own opinions and be more knowledgeable about draft prospects so we could be a font of information for fans over here in the UK, so I created our College Football Podcast with Ryan who is our resident college football guy so we had an outlet during the season to drip out information about prospects and just CFB in general to help our listeners when it comes to manic draft season.

But my knowledge about College Football was almost zero, so like with the NFL at the start of ROTL UK, I thrust myself into learning every little bit that I could, devoting days upon days to research about conferences, recruiting, teams, the draft process, amateur scouting and much more, and over the years my knowledge levels thankfully have grown. So the project suddenly went from one hour a week just talking and no prep work to;

• Properly researching for our main Lions Podcast

• Doing the Podcast

• Social Media for the Podcast

• Creating and researching for a second show for College Football

• Content Creation for the Podcast

To put into perspective, a College Podcast takes about a day of hard work to get right because there is so many games and teams you have to work hard to filter out the right information, scout players, preview games, review games, go over relevant news etc. The main podcast is twice a week, for reviews you generally watch the game a second time then collate all the data and research to get your points ready, then previews you gotta dig down into other teams to try and find talking points others are missing as well as doing all the prep for your own team. The shows themselves are a couple of hours so there is that time as well. Twitter is a daily project, it's easier cause you can just get out your phone and do what you need to but the mind is always thinking of ideas for on there and of course the streams during the games provide a tonne of interaction so between every snap I'll be on tweeting away. And then of course we need to devote time to finding new ideas for content and for current shows which takes times, usually over zoom meetings which last for ages cause we all just love to chat. And all this is unpaid work, we keep what we make for the podcast, it's upkeep and for the future.

'Why would you do all this work?'

Another question we get asked a lot, and it goes back to one of the problems of running a UK NFL Podcast.....Believability. We have to work harder, we have to research harder, we have to promote harder, we have to be the very best that we can be, because that is the only way people will ever take us seriously as a British NFL Podcast. There's no half arsing this, if you don't put in the effort to learn and provide good content, you will soon be forgotten about. For my money, the Detroit Lions content creating community is the best in the entire NFL, I can think right off the bat of quite a few incredibly good, knowledgeable podcasts with huge followings of Lions fans, and whilst that is great, it means this is not an arena where you can come unprepared, you have to work even harder than usual to try and get a foothold in the game.

And as the years have gone by it's yielded results. Due to the efforts of the entire team (Matt, Me, both the Ryan's, Ash, Steve, Tom, Martin) we went from a podcast that got 10 listens a week to our current total just approaching 125,000 total listens and we have similar views on Youtube too. Against all odds we've managed to carve out our own little niche in the Lions sphere, because of the sheer amount of work and dedication that goes in to it.

We did not do it alone though. The Lions community has been very good to us, and to me. At the very beginning when Luke G and his Field Reviews allowed us on his shows to come talk Lions, he's a shining light for promoting and helping up podcasts just getting going and he's become a good friend even though like most of you, I've not had the chance to meet yet. Then Jim Bordeau and Curt Steele at Lions On The Prowl allowed a still very green me on to their Free For All Fridays to chat away and allow ROTL UK another platform to grow. Then Micro Mike, who I have no business doing shows with cause he's the GOAT and I'm a random British podcaster, gave us the time of day and helped us out as well and I've now done many a show with him. And somehow we ended up as past of Lions Nation Unite, led by the famous Lion Herman Moore himself who I've gotten to do shows with, something I never would have even dreamed of when starting this project, with a whole host of other great Lions Podcasts involved. To be looked at in the same sentence as some of these creators is more than we could have ever hoped. Honestly there are so many people I could shout out and you know who you are!

Over the last four years, the shy and hopeless version of me that started up on this podcast has gone. It's given me the confidence to speak to people, the Lions and American football in general have become a very big passion of mine and unleashed creative boundaries in me that I never realised I had. And to be honest I'm incredibly proud to say that I helped create a project which was against all odds on ever been able to take off.

But to the point of this whole article....

I don't speak for anyone else, but for me it's had it's difficulties, most of which you don't see on the screen when we are been our charming, British selves. The research can get draining, especially around draft season when so much is going on, and it's sometimes hard to justify it, now I usually take some time off post draft to relax and recover. The College Pod probably has about half a dozen dedicated listeners after 3 years of working like crazy on it. Growth is slow and it does not reflect on the effort that gets put into the product but again that comes back to the initial issues that this is just an incredibly hard market we have chosen to go after. It's sometimes hard, especially now we are known over the pond, to not got Imposter Syndrome at times. I've never seen the Lions live, not even been over to Detroit yet and you sometimes wonder why your doing a project for something you've never seen live and people you have never met, especially when you put so much time into it.

But the hardest part, is keeping the drive alive in the tough times. I'll spare the details but COVID was a particularly tough time for me, I learned over the period of isolation how much I'd prioritised work in the years prior and how little I'd prioritised myself, and that I was not in a good place mentally. And it's a battle I've been fighting ever since, sometimes I do well, a lot of times I don't. This year has been tough, it's been a lot of bad news and tough situations. And it's in those times you begin to question how much is the project worth....

I'm not looking for sympathy, everybody has their own battles going on.

There are a lot of times I've wanted to tap out. It's easy to think of all the hours I could recoup of not having to do any podcast work any more at all and do other things with it, and there are that many great Lions podcasters around that no one would notice if I did.

So why have I not?.....

Obviously the team at ROTL UK get a huge shout out, we are close knit even if we rarely meet, this project has required everyone to get to where it has.

But in a nutshell, it's all of you. Those of you taking the time to read this, to listen to our shows, to give us a platform, who comment on the streams, who tweet me on twitter, every single interaction is a reminder of the work put in to this, and how it has been worth it. Whether it been on our pods or some of the others I guest on, seeing people recognise you and be like 'Hey it's Ant-man', 'Hey Ant', I've even been christened 'The Brit with Grit'. To know there are actually people out there who enjoy when I'm on a show and actually want to listen to what I say provides vindication for all the work that's been put in, some days it gets me on stream when I don't feel in the mood for it. The College Pod has half a dozen dedicated listeners, but they are our dedicated listeners. Be it Brent teasing about Army wrecking Air Force's 2023 season, Lisa wanting to know about prospects, Milemarker the proud Golden Gopher (who I apologise for jinxing against Rutgers last weekend), or Grandizer wanting us to sing the Lions fight song, the fact that they care enough to want to know when the show is, or want information about certain things, and want their college football takes from us means everything. As long as there is a need for it, it makes it worth it.

As a listener, you may not see the less glamorous side of content creation behind the scenes off stream, but on stream you get to see your effect on the creators, or at least this one, when your in the building with your comments, questions, likes, shares. Every interaction matters;

• If you want to ask something, ask it

• If you have an opinion, post it

• If you can spread the word, spread it

It may seem insignificant, but you may just give someone the boost they need that day to carry on doing what they do.

Every time I think about giving it up, I think back to the journey that got me here, I think of all the work put in, all the people who helped, and most importantly every one who chooses to listen to our shows and supports us, without you I'd have given up long ago.

Enough about me though, lets go win this damn Super Bowl and get ready for the Mother Of All Parties when we do, I'll row across the Atlantic if need be to make that!

Go OnePride!