@golaz0live: An Unsung Hero
By JEHAN BOER ‘21
In times of easily accessible information, we quickly turn to every-day media for most of our news. To be more specific, we rely heavily on social media platforms like Instagram to inform us of the upcoming and ongoing stories around us. In a world filled to the brim with sports news, for every dunk, cross-up, and pair of ankles broken, you follow House of Highlights; for anything related to college football or the NFL, you follow Sportscenter; and for anything at all under the realm of sports you follow Bleacher Report. There is almost always an Instagram page to keep you updated on any category you can think of. Big, brand-name pages like House of Highlights and Bleacher Report dominate the Instagram hierarchy with millions and millions of followers, likes, and views. Viewers and fans are able to go to these brand-name pages for all kinds of information: the gossip, the talk, and the statistics. But among the giants of Instagram lie the small, unsung heroes of the sports world.
In the empire of the world’s most watched sport, soccer, the same big brand names take charge. Pages like Bleacher Report Football and 433 take most of the fame, with millions of followers each, but that doesn’t mean that smaller pages aren’t doing as much as the big ones are. For example, take Golazolive (@golaz0live). Considered by some the #1 most trusted soccer transfer source, Golazolive hides as one of the most under-the-radar Instagram pages regarding soccer. You would think that, being the #1 most trusted transfer source, the page would be relatively popular, but it garners very little recognition, as it has only around 300,000 followers, compared to the millions that other pages boast.
What makes Golazolive so unique is the fact that it is a homemade page. You see, the huge, brand-name pages are industrially run; they rely on views and advertisements for profit. Yes, their goal is to present information for their audiences, but the page’s purpose, first and foremost, is to make money.
Golazolive is different; it’s sole purpose to provide information, and it does so exceptionally well. Golazolive is more reliable, and relatively faster at giving information than other pages are. It’s speed and reliability stems from a lack of an office or marketing team behind the page. Instead, it is run by an individual. The beauty of Golazolive’s page is that someone runs it straight from their home, giving it a homemade status. Even today, no one knows who is behind the 24/7 Instagram account that is able to provide more information than pages making thousands of dollars to do the same work.
What is so respectable about Golazolive is that the page isn’t using its audience’s reliance on information to make a profit. The page is solely to keep people updated on something they love.
On the other hand, being such a small page does have it’s disadvantages. In 2018, three years after Golazolive was started, the page got taken down for copyright issues, and lost its 2.2 million followers. Recently it has made a comeback, returning as a new page with the same speed and reliability. After 6 months, the page has only been able to recover a small percentage of its original followers, and has had to keep its return lowkey in order to dodge anymore copyright issues, but that is the danger of being a small instagram page these days. Golazo continues to provide information to their followers quickly with nothing in return, and just doing that is respectable. If you are an avid soccer fan, I urge you to check the page out.