Good morning, everyone. Let the World Cup withdrawal begin. It’s been a wild month of action, one that will go down as a truly great World Cup, and now we all have to go back to whatever it was we were doing before we began watching 6 hours of soccer a day.  But fear not. For the club season is just around the corner. And as much as I love the World Cup, I must say that I prefer watching Arsenal. If you liked the action in Brazil and think you might want to watch more soccer, make sure to check out the Premier League. I absolutely love it.

However, before we move on from the World Cup, there is reflection to be done. I have a post lined up for later this afternoon about my team of the competition, with a 23-man squad complete with a best XI and a second-best XI. That should be up soon. And then at some point later this week, I’ll have a piece about what my lasting memories will be about this last month. Today, however, I would like to reflect about how the World Cup inspired this blog.

A little more than a month ago, I wanted to start a blog for a few reasons. I wanted to improve my writing, with the idea that doing more of it would be helpful. And I wanted to see how I liked writing about sports on a daily basis – with an eye towards figuring out if sports journalism is a legitimate career option. Writing this blog was also an excuse to watch as many games as I physically could. I thought I would write a post a day, likely more for myself than for any readers, and that I’d probably shut the blog down at the end of the summer.

But as I started writing every day, I quickly developed an affinity for writing these posts. I challenged myself to get as much quality content as I could up on the site, with the faint hope of developing a readership, even at the expense of many hours spent on my computer each day. At the beginning, my viewership was quite small. But slowly but surely, more visitors have started coming to the site. Yesterday was the third straight day I hit triple-digits with visitors, a significant rise from only two or three weeks ago. And I hit 3,000 views overall after the Final.

I received some scorn from my friends for how specific my prediction section was, but I had a lot of fun writing vivid descriptions of games before they happened. And by the end, I was doing pretty well, even with getting final scores and goalscorers right. My predictions didn’t start off so well in the group stage, but I ended up correctly predicting 15 of the 16 winners in the knockout round. I think that’s a pretty decent percentage if I may say so myself.

But aside from my success with predictions, the coolest part about this last month has been watching where my viewers come from. I never dreamed of writing for an international audience, but as of now, people in 58 different countries have looked at this blog. For me, the greatest part about the World Cup is that it’s a truly global event. And I got to experience that firsthand. Whoever has read my stuff in Namibia, Vietnam, Cyprus, Qatar, Colombia and in so many other nations, I say thank you.

As I said yesterday, Wild American Gooner is not ending anytime soon. My dream of becoming a sports journalist is alive and well, and I will continue writing on here as much as I can. For the time being, I’ll try to have daily posts in the mornings, with the occasional afternoon or evening post on anything significant that’s happened that day. There will be a lot of Arsenal content – I plan on outlining my expectations for each player in the squad in the coming weeks, doing two or three at a time. But I’ll probably also have more writing about the Red Sox. So despite the end of the World Cup, the site is alive and well.

Now, as we move on to the next chapter of the sports world, I want to stop and say thank you. I’m loving every second of this. Keep checking back for more content, share the link with anyone you think might be interested, and please give me any feedback you think might help improve the site. Thanks for reading.