Platform Guide

The Platform is the reader-facing side of Breaking The Lines: where football content, live match data, and community engagement come together. Everything below is available today; deeper how-tos will grow out from these overviews.

Reading & discovery

Breaking The Lines hosts long-form tactical analysis, scouting reports, match analysis, opinion pieces and historical features from independent creators and Squads, alongside BTL TV (video), podcasts and the Zine. Discovery runs on:

• Search — behavioural, diacritics-insensitive search across content and football entities, so misspellings and accented names still resolve.
• Following — follow creators, Squads, clubs, players and managers to shape your feeds.
• @mentions — content and Thoughts link directly to the players, clubs and managers they're about.
• Library — bookmarks and reading progression, so you can pick up long reads where you left off.
• Inbox — a running feed of activity relevant to you (replies, mentions, follows, and more).

Thoughts

Short-form quick takes with player, club and manager mentions, likes and replies, surfaced in a trending feed. Thoughts are the fast, conversational layer of the platform — the equivalent of a hot take or a live reaction — versus the long-form articles creators publish in Studio.

Game Centre

Rich match pages for live and finished games, combining editorial context with real match data:

• Score and match clock — live state for in-progress matches.
• Confirmed lineups and formations — starting XI, subs, and formation boards.
• Minute-by-minute event timelines — goals, cards, subs and other key moments as they happen.
• xG and shot maps — per-shot expected goals and shot location data for covered matches.
• Team and player match statistics — the numbers behind the game.
• Penalty shootout handling — dedicated presentation for shootouts, not just another set of "goals."
• Editorial "About" tab — related coverage surfaced against the match, connecting the data to the writing.

Ratings and grades

Rate matches and players on a BILD-style 1 to 6 scale (1 is best) — the same convention used by major European football media. Grading includes player grade boards, Player of the Match, and rating clubs so you can compare your scores against your community rather than just a global average.

Competitions, standings and fixtures

Group and league tables, fixtures rails, and season selection across competitions. This covers both:

• Provider-fed tables for real leagues and competitions, kept in sync with live results.
• Derived standings for simulated tournaments — for example, a World Cup group stage computed from played fixtures rather than sourced pre-built.

Prediction rounds

Submit picks for upcoming fixtures, organised into rounds. Once submitted you can see the crowd pulse (how everyone else is picking) and climb prediction leaderboards. Settlement is automated once matches finish — no manual scoring.

The Arena

Your personalised football dashboard: followed clubs, what's on now and next, popular players, fixtures grouped by state (live, upcoming, finished), and an editorial feed tailored to what you follow. The Arena is the "open the app and see what matters to me" home screen.

Entity pages

Every football entity — players, clubs, managers, competitions — is first-class, not a tag or a category. Each has a canonical profile with biography and imagery, career and season data where available, and every piece of coverage tagged to it. This is powered by the same identity spine that drives the Game Centre and standings, so entity pages stay accurate as new data and coverage arrive.

Reader plans

Both Pro and Line Breakers are available monthly or annually, with a free trial on Pro.