My 3rd anniversary as a member of BFW!

If you look at your calendar, it should say the 22^nd of March 2023. If so, then that means I’ve now been a part of the wonderful community of BFW for three years! I wrote a fanpost on my second anniversary last year; this piece will be a sort of update to that piece (added with more stuff).

My first experience with BFW was back in 2017 when the “Anderlecht Fleecing” was the talk of the town after the Belgian club charged an exorbitant fee for the traveling Bayern fans. I’ve sporadically visited the site around this period but frequented as time went on.

Göz Atın

Match awards from Germany’s soul-crushing 1-0 defeat to Poland

Three observations from Germany’s demoralizing 1-0 defeat to Poland

Poland 1-0 Germany: Initial reactions and observations

Then, March 2020 came…

March 21-22, 2020: It was one week into lockdown, and I was already bored out of my mind. My brother just started his Reddit account, which spurred me to do the same. When I finished that, I decided that I should make an account for BFW after being a lurker for three years. Back then you had to wait for one day so your account will be fully activated. When it was finally activated, I then went to skyfire322’s fanpost titled “Bayern Munich — When and Why?” My first comment on the site read as:

Oh man, where do I begin? My dad loved things from Germany, as he had owned stuff like that during his childhood. He was already a fan of football, so football + Germany = Bayern Munich (obviously, because BVB equals syntax error). When they won everything in 2012-2013, we got hooked, just in time for the 2014 World Cup too. That fueled me and my sibling to play football. My sib plays a lot like Thomas Müller, and I played as a defender from 2014-2016. I was a solid rock in defence, until OSD (Osgood-Schlatter Disease, wherein a bump forms on your knee. Nothing too serious) screwed things up. My knee would hurt when stressed. Insert FIFA Mobile, that’s where I’ve played football since.

Fergus was the first one to reply to my comment, but I was still in and out most of the time. I became more engaged in September that year, and I still lament not celebrating our Champions League run in Lisbon with the rest of BFW. From seeing off Chelsea FC, to THAT legendary game against FC Barcelona, downing Lyon, and beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final.

It was also fitting that Fergus, the pun machine himself, was the first person I interacted with because I built up a reputation for making funny comments. BFW honestly gave me something different to do when I was holed up inside my home. The site managed to keep me sane during those hard times. It sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but being able to communicate with fellow football fans was something refreshing since there’s not many people I could talk football with.

I was a regular commenter for the next two years, but May 2022 was a time I’ll never forget. An opportunity of a lifetime.

The date was May 15; I’ve just read that Phil has stepped down from writing and calls for hiring writers came about not long after (something that INNN and Muller_Era brought to my attention). After careful consideration, I decided: I’m gonna try out for the job, so I wrote a sample article and submitted it. Although I told myself that it’ll be okay if I don’t make the cut, I still held out for the best. Then the email came one month later, and it said that I’m in! I was over the moon because writing about the football team I love was something I always wanted to do!

So, the day after I got the email, I joined the site’s Slack channel and got to know the rest of the staff more. INNN and Chuck showed me the ropes when I first joined, and I eventually got the hang of it after a while. Getting paid to write is also a huge upside (so is bantering Tom about Liverpool’s woes).

My most commented article is the one about Robert Lewandowski’s stuttering form in his first month in Barcelona. It amassed 153 comments and thousands of views. The same can be said for my post about Spanish referee Antonio Mateu Lahoz having a ‘mare in the World Cup. I’ve written my 100^th article in October, my 200^th in December, and my 300^th in February (last month). This one here is my 333^rd article for the site (Jack White is gonna love this with all of those 3’s). It all fits, you know?

If you’ve made it this far, then I sincerely thank you for sticking around. I hope you continue to read articles here in BFW (mine included!) and make us the best community for Bayern and Germany football fans there is (if we aren’t already). That’s it from me, and thanks for reading!

Check out my milestone articles and some of my picks for my best articles below.