Yes, it’s summer, which means most of Europe is on vacation. And yes, it’s the silly season when transfer speculation is rife and the season hasn’t kicked off yet. But I don’t know about you, but I’ve been really disappointed with the level of football journalism post-World Cup. That pertains to both the blogosphere and traditional news organizations.

Hopefully coverage will pick up as soon as the season begins. But right now, if you eliminated the preseason friendly and transfer speculation articles from most football blogs and online newspapers, you wouldn’t have much to choose from. And even with what is leftover, the quality and creativity is quite poor.

The other thing I’ve noticed, and this hasn’t been a recent development, is the amount of soccer news that is regurgitated. There is very little original content out there. Typically what happens is that either The Daily Mirror or The “Love them or hate them” Sun will publish a transfer story. And then the next day, the other newspapers in London (The Independent, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Times, etc) will publish the same story. And in the middle of that you’ll see several hundred soccer websites and blogs reporting the same news.

Then the whole cycle happens again the following day. Yes, it sells newspapers and increases pageviews, but it begins to get quite repetitive and predictable after a while.

Journos might defend themselves by saying there’s nothing really interesting to write about. But that’s hogwash. There’s plenty of room for creativity. And just because there’s no season going on doesn’t mean that the football world grinds to a halt.

Thankfully there are several sites out there that continue to raise the bar in terms of originality and/or creativity. Most of those are independent sites, but they include Zonal Marking, The Guardian, 101 Great Goals, Pitch Invasion and The Run Of Play.

What will be interesting to watch this season will be the quantity and quality of content provided by the soccer-centric websites. The Guardian, for one, has been cutting back and not producing as much quality content as we’re accustomed to. The Times of London moved to a paywall to try to improve the monetization of their content. And in the meantime, a small but passionate blog named Some People Are On The Pitch closed it doors a couple of days after the 2010 World Cup ended.

As we enter a stage which many financial experts are calling a Double Dip Recession, content providers are going to be questioning their business models and looking for ways to cut back. One of the first things to go as a result of this is investigative reporting, which often is costly and takes a lot of time to research and write. Plus, it can be a risk for some media organizations especially when they’re dealing with sensitive information that some parties may not want leaked.

Here at EPL Talk, we’ll continue to watch from the touchline and try to bring you as much valuable and original content as possible. It’s not easy, as many of us are marooned around the world and not on the streets of England where the Premier League action unfolds, but we’ll do our best.