I don’t get to watch many football matches nowadays, so my iPhone is essential for feeding me the latest updates. The two sites I frequent most often to get live updates are The Guardian and the BBC.

While keeping an eye on the Blackburn Rovers versus Manchester United game last weekend, I was annoyed by all the cruft at the top of the page. As you can see in the following screenshots (click for larger size), there is no mention of the current score on either site. The only relevant match information on The Guardian page is what teams are playing.

On desktop browsers the live update pages are automatically refreshed. Unfortunately this is not the case on mobile Safari. It doesn’t take long to get frustrated by this as you have to scroll past it twice (up to top of page, press refresh, back to content) every time you refresh.

After scrolling past the images I could see the updates. As you can see both sites take a slightly different approach here. The BBC site prefixes updates with the time of day, while The Guardian prefixes with the time elapsed in the game. The Guardian also include some rather unhelpful information about refreshing with the F5.

I mocked up what I would like to see on one of these sites. For no particular reason I picked The Guardian for the example. In the spirit of maximizing the amount of information relevant to the match I decided to eliminate navigation elements (I can use the back functionality of the browser for that), reduce the size of the branding graphic, have the latest score fixed to the top of the screen, and use match time prefixes like The Guardian already use.

In the words of King Kev “I would love it” if The Guardian page was like this.