BeyondThePrem covers the Championship, League One, and the Women’s Super League. Most of what you read here is the work of one person — me, Kieron — and the aim is to produce genuine, useful coverage of three divisions that the bigger outlets usually ignore.
Under the hood, BTP runs a custom WordPress plugin with over 70 purpose-built shortcodes for tables, charts, and analytics, backed by a private database holding eight seasons of historical match and player data, a daily automated pipeline for odds and predictions, and a knowledge base of scraped articles refreshed every morning. Built, run, and edited by one person.
How a one-person site covers three leagues
To run weekly coverage of three divisions as a single editor, I’ve built an infrastructure stack that takes the grunt work off my plate so I can focus on editorial decisions, analysis, and the Hull City bits most readers come here for.
- A local machine-learning model I’ve built and trained from scratch, using eight seasons of fixture and player data, generates the match outcome probabilities that appear in our ML Predictions sections. The models are calibrated logistic regressions with player-quality features — fully documented and under continuous improvement.
- A scraping pipeline collects match reports from BBC Sport and the Guardian into a private knowledge base, so no story goes unseen during the working week.
- AI assistance — both cloud models (Claude) and a local model running on my own hardware (Ollama) — helps draft the weekly digest and long-form summaries. The AI drafts; I review, edit, and fact-check every piece before it’s published.
- An automated fact-check pass verifies every specific claim in a draft — scores, players, promotions, records — against the match database before publishing. This catches the factual errors AI tools are prone to.
What stays human
Nothing on this site is published without editorial review. Opinions, angles, and the decisions about what to cover are mine. If a piece is wrong, that’s on me — please get in touch via the Contact page so I can correct it.
The tooling lets me cover three leagues at a weekly pace that would otherwise require a small team. The writing direction, the judgement calls, and the accountability are still the work of one long-time football fan sitting in front of a Minisforum in the north of England.
Why we’re open about this
Plenty of sites now use AI-assisted workflows quietly, and some do it poorly — low-effort articles that hallucinate facts and damage reader trust when caught. That’s not what we do, and the only way to prove it is to show our working. If you spot an error, a weird phrasing, or a claim that doesn’t check out — email in. Corrections go up promptly and are noted.
— Kieron, editor