My 2023-24 Futbology badges

I use the Futbology app to record which football matches I see. Sometimes when I check in to games I hit a milestone and get a 'badge'. Here are some of the badges I collected in 2023-24.

First the biggie - completing a league! (In this case the Cymru Premier on the very last match weekend of the Cymru Premier season.)

My 500 game milestone came early in the season.

My personal records date from the start of the 1992-93 season. So this milestone is games since then. It doesn't include the games I went to as a kid. 

Just before the end of the season I reached 550 games recorded on the app.

While my 500th game was a regular league game, the 550th was the promotion play off game to decide which second place team in the third tier of the Cymru leagues would get promoted to the second tier. 

I visited my 125th football ground in May as well.

And some more big numbers - 200 games with Shrewsbury and 100 games with Barry.

And some smaller milestones with other clubs

According to Futbology, I'm currently the number one Cardiff Draconians fan using the app - so I know this badge is unique and nobody else has a 25 game badge with the team.

Plus, I got a badge for going to a Europa League game

I picked up a couple of other badges during the season as well. Checking in to a game on the birthday of a Ballon d'Or winner results in a badge. I did get a few of those. But these milestones are the ones that made me feel most happy when they popped up on the app.

Missing moobs

I was asked, as my newest alter ego Kev, to write a short piece on self-worth. And I did, using an old blog post as a launch point.

But between submission and publication the word moobs was changed to boobs, with no ‘man’ placed strategically in front of them. So I think I have achieved two firsts.

1) Professionally, to become the first person in my esteemed organisation’s history to have something published with the word 'boobs' in it, referring to breasts; and

2) Personally to somehow alter gender in the hands of a, presumably well-meaning, editor… and not only that but become the kind of woman who bares all on the beach and feels no shame in letting people know about it. Which, if I was a woman, I suppose is the kind of woman I’d like to be.