JackArmy.net – Twenty-Five Years And Out

Nobody could have foreseen, back on 1 July 2001, that when I took over the reins of this website it would still be here almost twenty‑five years later. Over the past few months I’ve found myself reflecting not just on the journey of the site, but on the extraordinary journey of the football club alongside it.

At that time, Swansea City were languishing in the bottom division, newly relegated from the third tier. There was no Tony Petty, no ‘Jack to a King’ storyline, and not even the faintest hint that the Premier League lay ahead. When I wrote my very first article, I had no idea that within months everything would change , not just for the club, but for how this site operated and the role it would come to play within the Swansea City community.

JackArmy.net was the first to break the news of Tony Petty’s takeover, at a moment when the local press were pursuing entirely different leads. It was also this site that broke the news of players being sacked on that infamous October day , reporting events as they unfolded, free from the constraints local journalists were forced to work under. That first article set the tone, and from that point on, both the club and the site were on a different path.

As the city rallied to save its football club, JackArmy.net became the place where those fighting for Swansea City’s future could get information out that simply couldn’t be reported elsewhere. I’ll never forget a conversation towards the end of 2001, when then‑club press officer Peter Owen told me that Tony Petty had complained that even from Australia, that “damn site” wouldn’t leave him alone. The website was growing , and so was the community around it.

When the club finally returned to local ownership, it was JackArmy.net that again broke the news first. The forum exploded as thousands of supporters celebrated long into the night , a true homecoming for the club. And the work didn’t stop there. Through relegation battles, promotion pushes in 2005 and 2008, and ultimately the unforgettable rise to the Premier League, the site was there every step of the way.

We documented the construction of what is now the Swansea.com Stadium in painstaking detail, inside and out. Daily reporting drove readership to levels few fan‑run sites could match at the time. From modest beginnings we grew to deliver more than two million page views a month for several years , for a club competing in League One and the Championship. It earned us Rivals.net Site of the Month awards and nominations in Football League blog awards, in an era before social media reshaped how fans followed their clubs.

As platforms rose and fell , from Rivals.net, to Fans Network, back to full independence during the Covid era , JackArmy.net endured. People came and went. Sadly, we also lost valued contributors along the way , voices that helped shape both the club and this community and will never be forgotten.

On a personal level, the site remained active throughout my time as Trust Chairman from 2005 to 2020. I remain deeply grateful to those who helped keep it going, especially during the difficult years of legal action against the club’s owners. Over twenty‑five years, the numbers tell only part of the story: hundreds of millions of page views, millions of forum posts, and millions of visitors , whether they dropped by once or stayed with us for decades.

Some former readers are now well‑known names in football media. While we didn’t launch careers, many have told me how much they valued the site in an era when access to Swansea City news was far more limited than it is today.

The site never got the mention it deserved in Jack to a King.  I was told because it didn’t help the “diversity and inclusion” quota for the site.   And that is why that film will never be the true reflection of the times it purports to cover – we weren’t the only exclusion from that particular fantasy but we were certainly one of them.

But all good things come to an end. Over the past year I’ve wrestled with what the future should hold, and I’ve reached the difficult conclusion that the time is right to step away. JackArmy.net will close its doors on Sunday 31 May, exactly fifteen years after recording its highest ever single‑day traffic , over 400,000 page views, as Swansea celebrated promotion to the Premier League.

I’ve spent twenty‑five of my fifty‑five years running this site, and that feels like a full shift. I’m immensely proud of what we achieved, of the friendships formed, and of the support this community offered , including to me personally during some very tough times. But I no longer have the time the site deserves, and it feels right to retire having given it everything I could.

It will be a sad day to close this chapter of my life, but I hope people understand why the time feels right. I’d love to see old posters return during the final month , one last swansong for old times’ sake. Online discussion may have changed beyond recognition, but there will always be a place for nostalgia in football.

For now, this is simply confirmation that for JackArmy.net, it’s twenty‑five years and out.

This article first appeared on JACKARMY.net.