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Occupation Road

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Occupation Road is a second site, built from this one’s codebase and designed so you wouldn’t know it. It contains long essays on the business of modern football, filtered through the lens of Watford FC.

It came out of a research vault. Since May I’ve kept one in Obsidian called Watford Intelligence: reading in, synthesis out, three hundred-odd sources so far. Once there was enough in it, a publication more or less suggested itself. I’d wanted to write about the club for a while anyway, having made Oh My Word, a podcast about Watford in the 1990s, a few years back. But this here site is a timeline of what I’m reading and watching, and it was never the right home for three thousand words on parachute payments.

Occupation Road took the job instead: long essays on the club’s finances, ownership and structure, argued from the statutory accounts rather than from the mood after Saturday.

Technically it’s a second instance of Showrunner’s core (Next.js, Supabase, Vercel), copied selectively rather than forked. The auth stack, markdown pipeline, admin CMS and search came across. The external feeds, and everything that makes this site a timeline, did not.

The harder job was making sure it didn’t look like this place. Same skeleton, different person wearing it, which meant giving up Showrunner’s typefaces along with its palette. The masthead is a UK street nameplate: bordered plate, letterspaced capitals, WATFORD underneath in signal red.

Some details:

  • Charts are set as statutory accounts in plain HTML and CSS, no chart library, and sit in a margin column beside the prose
  • Essays travel one way out of the vault via a publish skill that resolves the wiki-links and writes the slug back into the source file
  • The favicon is the nameplate with the type taken out, on the grounds that a keyline box holding two lines of wide-tracked capitals is a grey smudge at 16px

Comments are off permanently, there are no ads, and nothing tracks you beyond server logs. It went live today, on the opening Friday of the 2026–27 league season, with one essay and two notes.

By way of explanation, Occupation Road itself is the service road behind the Graham Taylor Stand, officially the Yellow Brick Road since 2023 though the old name has stuck. Mike Vince, whose commentary catchphrase gave the podcast its title, worked the gantry on that side of the ground all decade.