A torrent of football

Miss Chelsea’s last minute heroics against Valencia? Manchester United demolishing Roma? Liverpool closeout PSV Eindhoven? Even Bayern Munich give way to AC Milan? Were both games on at the same time and you wish you could see the other? Have no fear, using the internet you can watch you football from any corner of the world for FREE.

In the last few months since my move to another continent I found myself starved of watching any football at all. I went from an 8 channel subscription to nil. I didn’t know what channels showed games or when they were on. Over time, as I gathered information I realized I had to pay a mountain of cash for special channels which showed a really small amount of games. I started to dig around for alternatives and found some good stuff I thought I would share.

Bittorrent has been around for years and I have used its vast peer to peer network to acquire more albums than I can listen to. I never considered downloading torrents with movies since I found their quality to be subpar and plus, who wants to watch a movie on a laptop screen? So I thought that maybe, since I noticed more and more television programs being posted, football programs might be available as well. I was right. If you know this already, don’t bother with this, if you want to see lots of football and can’t, keep reading.

Match of the Day was a staple of my life. Although I had an 8 channel football subscription that brought me more matches than I could possibly watch, I still loved the distillation of the best from all the day’s Premiership games into one very well presented highlight show (minus that arrogant Alan Hansen). It was quite honestly the thing I missed most of all from living in Europe. Week in and week out I became more and more frustrated reading about great games and performances. I even started watching clips on youtube.com which were tiny, awful quality and inevitably included a foreign commentator absolutely screaming non-stop. I craved that subtle, measured English voice and a full screen of video in which I could actually recognize the players.

Then quite by chance one day I was looking for some music on www.isohunt.com and coincidentally matched the album I was searching for to BBC’s Match of the Day. The light bulbs went off and the skies parted. I must have checked that first MOTD download about 293 times. When it was finally done, I sat down and felt the normalcy.

From there, I stared to look more and more and found a wealth of games and highlight shows available for download. I will share what I have found. Before I do so, I want to give a big thank you to all the people out there who upload these matches for others. You are good friends to us all.

So, what do you do if you want to see some games?

Bittorrent is a peer to peer file sharing tool which allows you to share files of any kind across the internet by connecting you with others interested in distributing or downloading the file (called seeding and leeching). Bittorrent works by SHARING. If you grab a file and remove it from your torrent client, your speeds can slow and you can get banned. A rule of thumb is never to remove a torrent before it’s shared to a 1:1 ratio.

So how do you get Bittorrent and how do I download games?

You are going to have to do a bit of work.

1. First, download a torrent client. I highly recommend UTorrent. Download UTorrent here. Its standalone and has a very small footprint.

2. Configure UTorrent and your home network to work with Bittorrent. You MUST take this step, first because your downloads will be slow, second because the trackers out there won’t recognize you are uploading and will ban you. Here is how to configure UTorrent. It’s safe. I have been doing it for years and have never had any issues.

3. Get yourself on the right torrent trackers. Available torrents are all listed in a variety of trackers, you search for what you want and then download the torrent file, which your torrent client will recognize automatically and start the download process. The best torrent trackers I have found are:

a. Demonoid (account required, registration is usually open on Friday’s)
b. Isohunt
c. Mininova
d. Torrentspy

But you want to watch football right? Well, then the place for you is fbtz.com, the Maxxed Football Forums. Here is where all the latest games are posted so you can be taken to the appropriate tracker and download the game. This site is fantastic and is far and away the best football site for torrents. Its broken up into sections such as full matches, shows and programs, highlights, and even classic matches (one of my personal favorites). Sign up, get an account and here you can find the games virtually as soon as they are over.

Now, this is not the most perfect thing ever since it involves time and effort but it does work and I am really enjoying the ability to download a game and watch it when I have time. I just have to stay away from the news so the score line is not spoiled and it’s as good as live. You have to be willing to wait for your game to download but it’s a worthwhile set of compromises to be able to watch the games.

A personal note, I like to collect the classic matches. I just watched Brazil – Portugal, World Cup 1966 the other day. Many classic matches are available at Maxxed Football, but they could use your help. If you have a classic match please learn how to make a torrent and post it. Many would love to take in the history. If you made it this far, you can mail me for a Demonoid invite and I will try and get you one, no promises.