A Guide to Football on Reddit

Why Reddit

Reddit is where football fans go to argue, celebrate, and overreact in real time. During a transfer window, r/soccer will have the news before most journalists tweet it. During a match, thousands of people are posting in a single thread as goals go in. Between games, the Daily Discussion Thread is where people ask questions, share opinions, and get into arguments about whether Gerrard or Lampard was better for the 400th time.

No other platform does this. Twitter is faster for breaking news but impossible to have a conversation on. Instagram is highlights and lifestyle content. TikTok is edits set to music. Reddit is the only place where you can read a 2,000-word tactical breakdown of why your team keeps conceding from set pieces, then scroll down and find someone asking which pub to go to near the ground. If you're into football and you're not on Reddit, you're missing the best free community the sport has.

How It Actually Works

If you've never used Reddit for football before, there are a few things that take a while to figure out on your own.

Match threads are posted for every significant game. They update with lineups, events, and stats, but the real point is the comments — thousands of people reacting in real time. Sort by "New" during a match or you'll only see comments from kickoff. They move fast and they're not the place for considered analysis. They're for shouting into the void when your striker misses an open goal.

The Daily Discussion Thread (DDT) is posted every day on r/soccer and most club subs. It's a catch-all for anything that doesn't warrant its own post: questions, opinions, smaller news. This is the heartbeat of the community between matches. If you want to ask something without making a full post, the DDT is the place.

Flairs are the club crests that appear next to your username. On r/soccer, your flair shapes how people read everything you write. Praise a player and they'll check your flair to see if you're a fan or a rival. Criticise a team and they'll check if you're a supporter or just piling on. Set your flair early — it's part of the experience.

Transfer tiers are something most big club subs maintain. Journalists and sources are ranked from Tier 1 (practically official) to Tier 4 (made it up). Learning your club's tier list is one of the most useful things you can do on football Reddit — it saves you from getting excited about nonsense from the Daily Mail.

If you follow matches through Reddit, you'll see people recommending live score apps constantly in match threads. The most popular ones — FotMob, SofaScore, and others — are all covered in our comparison guide.

The Unwritten Rules

Every subreddit has rules in the sidebar. Read them. But there's a layer underneath that you only learn by being there.

Moderation varies wildly between subs. Some club subreddits welcome any discussion. Others will remove your post if the title format is wrong, or if they decide it belongs in the DDT instead. A few are strict enough that the only reliable way to share something is as a comment in the DDT rather than a standalone post. Don't take it personally — most mods are volunteers doing it around their actual jobs.

Original content gets rewarded, recycled opinions don't. A well-made stat graphic, a genuine tactical question, or a match report from a lower-league game will do better than "unpopular opinion: [extremely popular opinion]." The communities can smell low-effort content.

Upvotes and downvotes create echo chambers. Popular opinions rise, unpopular ones get buried. This leads to "circlejerks" — a term for when a particular take gets repeated and reinforced until it dominates discussion. The satirical sub r/soccercirclejerk exists to parody exactly this. It's funny if you get the references and incomprehensible if you don't.

When posting news, link the source directly. Screenshots of tweets are generally frowned upon. Editorialised titles will get your post removed on most subs. Just post the link with the original headline and add your take in the comments.

Lurking is fine. Most people on football Reddit never post. They subscribe to their club sub, r/soccer, and maybe a league sub, and they read. That's a perfectly good way to use it. Curate your subscriptions and you've got a personalised football newspaper that updates constantly. If you want to go deeper, the apps people discuss most often on these subs — for scores, tactics, fantasy, and streaming — are the same ones we review on footyapps.

Reddit vs. Everywhere Else

Compared to Football Twitter, Reddit is better for conversation and worse for breaking news. The threaded comment system means discussions can actually develop over hours rather than disappearing in a timeline. The downside is the upvote system buries unpopular opinions, so you get a narrower range of takes than on Twitter where everyone is just shouting at once.

Reddit doesn't give you direct access to players or journalists the way Twitter does. What it gives you instead is community — match threads where you're watching with thousands of other fans, club subs where people actually know what they're talking about, and a depth of discussion you won't find on any other platform. For most football fans, it's worth using both. Use whatever app you prefer to browse — most people use the official Reddit app these days, though old.reddit.com still has its devotees for the desktop experience.