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Soccer Supremo Update (Patreon)

Published:
2026-10-23 12:25:15
Imported:
2026-10

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Content

Hi all!

I just wanted to give an update about the Soccer Supremo situation and to talk about what I'm doing as a result.

[Quick admin note first. If you're on tiers 1 or 2, you don't get notifications about new chapters. I update the chapters on Monday and Friday, usually before the afternoon, and if you log in to Patreon you'll see new content. Patreon isn't good at letting me ping one group without pinging everyone else. It's not ideal, I know, but you always get your swag.)

Okay. The Situation.

For those not in the loop (lucky you), the website where I was uploading the story asked me to remove some 'political content'. I said no. Pretty simple, but when I deleted the story (instead of agreeing to be censored) the whole thing blew up and turned into a culture war, where a culture war is defined as a battle between cultured people and uncultured people. [Boom! Great line! Control S save. That's mint, Ted. You're killing this.]

Across six or seven increasingly bizarre Reddit threads, hundreds of people took my side (many are authors too and found the incident troubling), while a dozen people reached out to offer tangible support like building a new website for me, and there were all sorts of other kindnesses.

Mega, billion-percent thanks! In retrospect, I needed that. You are awesome.

But hundreds of people who were happily reading the story for free were suddenly not able to, and that's not great. I know money is tight.

So to address that, I have been scrambling to create alternatives. If you signed up to the Patreon simply to get your next Max Best fix, I gotchu, fam.

Web Readers

Read the whole of Soccer Supremo on my new favourite website. It's so streamlined! I actually love it.

https://soccersupremo.com/

(Mega thanks to Discord legend nid for his help. When I say help, he did almost the whole thing, but I had enough input to feel part of it. "Nid! It needs less cowbell!" Btw, here's a fresh Discord link if anyone wants to chat about the story. It's friendly. Ironically, I enforce a pretty strict no politics rule. Lolz. Here's the link.)

I don't know what I'm going to do about the third set of books, Dictator of Football. In a sane world, I would have started posting them on the former website next week. Please bear with me while I try to find solutions.

Ebooks

I know that a lot of people take a story's web files and turn them into epubs and mobis to read on other devices and stuff. I was planning to slowly start getting the ebooks for SS 2-7 ready anyway, but I won't publish for realz until they have human-generated covers. My artist is busy and I want to wait for him because I love his work.

But I can offer book 1 right now, and I spent a few days getting book 2 together. It doesn't have the right cover and you might find some formatting issues (like match action that isn't in bold etc.) If you find anything wrong, please let me know so I can fix it before the official release! It should be 98% good, though.

You will find those files in the 'attachments' section of this post. Enjoy!

What about books 3-7? I will create them one by one and add them to this post, so if you're interested, maybe you can bookmark this. If I find a more logical place to store them, I'll add them there, too.

Text to Voice

Another thing that a lot of audiobook-first people do is take a web page and use text to voice software to create a rudimentary audiobook reading. (Couple of you are bristling at the word rudimentary. Soz!)

This is done with AI. Now before you shout at me, I think my credentials are impeccable as someone who supports real human voice acting. I financed SS1 myself, from start to finish, and it cleaned out my bank account just as my investments in Peruvian mining companies were tanking. (That last part is a joke, just in case that's not clear. Those investments are WAY up.)

If I could afford to get Luke to read every word I ever wrote, I totally would! I'm only talking here about replicating something that a surprising number of readers already do, or used to do.

There are different versions that different people like, but you'll find a demo of what one voice sounds like in the attachments. I believe the AI is called 'azure'. The extract is from a chapter most of you haven't got to yet, but it's totally spoiler-free, absolutely safe to check it out. For truck drivers, the blind, and people who just can't actually sit to read the text, this seems to be an acceptable solution and the tech is getting better.

My vague, half-formed plan is to offer these here on Patreon, maybe tucked away in a special chapter that you could bookmark. Not totally sure, but if there is interest, the guy who makes them is more than happy to share the audio.

If you hate it, please don't say that. Just skip this! Thanks. If you have a better setup that you'd be willing to share, get in touch!

[He's not the only one who does this. Two different people told me this week that they have a bot that scans the internet EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES hoping I am dropping a new chapter. When one arrives, the bots go into processing mode and they generate the audio. I'm not sure if they automatically change the word 'gammon' and strip out all references to Brexit, but hey ho, nothing's perfect.]

Summary

It has been a mad week and I have been forced to spend waaaay too much time dealing with the drama, but I'm starting to feel that it's behind me. Please don't stir things up on Reddit - I just want to write the next chapter of the story. (Max is going to redacted some redacteds, not only redacted but also in redacted!!!! I know. The crazy little scamp.)

Files

Comments

Thomas Barrett

I feel like being involved (and winning) a culture war on Reddit is a pretty big green tick and right of passage as a writer 🙂

nid

The voice in the mp3 is surprisingly listenable. The pacing would drive me right up the wall, though. Kudos to those who use this method! I'm glad it lets you listen to the story. That's the most important part, of course.

Ricky Kukowski

Wait, you took your story off Royal Road because they were trying to stop Max doing political stunts? I would’ve never guessed that they tried to censor you on that site. I saw you removed it, but I didn’t know why.

Rhok

I use the normal Read Aloud in edge, and read along, and read the previous chapter before the new one, and had read the whole of S1 and S2 when they completed. You know.... so they stick. I like the voice for this one! I assume it is closer to a Manc accent? But you are correct... the pacing is wonky... and for some reason the Read Aloud really gets the quotes right. This one need maybe a tiny pause before a quote? In an ideal world, AI would have given us the complete thing with different and unique voices for all the people who talk. AI needs to sort itself out... people are taking to long.

Eidetic Eidolon

I can't believe Royal Road would do anything like that. Someone must have been aiming for you. If Royal Road cares what people put into their writing, they need to get to censoring pretty much everyone but you... I can't believe we live in a world in which erotica about humans and beast/human hybrids is celebrated and political stuff in a fake version of England is censored. I personally think Max is way too much of a social justice warrior...but not to the point where I find it more offensive than straight up bestiality erotica.

Jazerus

Alan Turner got to Royal Road!

Jon Weisz

I left Royal Road for your patreon then noticed the android app didn't have the same read aloud controls that the royal road app had, so I used openai Astra to reverse engineer the patreon app and add them. It took about an hour!

Gerardo

Woah! Did not know this! Sorry you had to deal with all the drama!! Seems like the FA was after you IRL ;) Thanks for an amazing story (makes me laugh in the train every time!) and please keep enjoying writing it..after all that is the important bit

EltariRayvek

That audio reading is WAY smoother than whatever RR uses. But really, I dont care what it sounds like as long as I can listen to the Greatest Living Englishman while I work.

EltariRayvek

You get use to it. Its shit, but allows me to listen while working. When Max mentions PA and CA and all of a sudden I hear a California 156 striker, it does throw you off a bit haha.

HappyNoms

I don't agree with it, but the reasoning goes: 1. Let authors write about real life organizations, company, and people. 2. RR gets sued by said companies/people, even if the lawsuits are debateably grey/justified. 3. All of RR goes down. Hence, they have an ambiguously worded and enforced policy around politics and corporations. Nobody typically throws lawsuits around for interlewds involving catgirls, hence the rules get mostly ambiguously enforced for politics/corporations. I personally fall more on the free speech side, but they're not wildly crazy.

5hugah5hane

This is more for local files, but as an Android user, I use @Voice Aloud Reader to read books that don't have audiobooks. It uses your phone's text to speech rather than an AI voice. It sounds kinda robotic. But you can choose the type of voice and adjust the pitch, tone, and speed to make it sound not so robotic. Also, I only tried epub files so I'm not sure if they work with mobi or kindle files. The app can be found in the Play Store. ElevenReader used to be a pretty good AI voice reader until they started charging based on how many words it read or something like that.

Ted Steel

This is a slight red herring, in my humble opinion. The topic in this case isn't whether I wrote anything that could get them sued. Their first claim was 'a large amount of political content'. I would argue there is actually a minuscule amount of political content and 99% of the story is Max mocking long throws, thinking about spending his XP, and saving up for self-cleaning toilets. The first thing RR said, the thing that THEY claim triggered the censorship, was the mentions of Brexit, me using the word gammon and fascist, and how I described Hungary. They never said 'because X might sue us.' If RR are using the legal defence angle now (I haven't seen it) it's retrospective and it's a reaction to the fact that 96% of redditors thought this stance was laughably absurd.

James Sorensen

Love the website and love the choice you made

Alix Gebhardt

I use text to speech but also buy all of the audiobooks and listen to them when they come out.

Eidetic Eidolon

I gotta say, Ted, I always thought you were a little too liberal with the changing of real people's and real organizations' names...but...it turns out you should have been changing the names of the countries and the planets and the sports too, apparently. I've always been of the opinion that your book series takes place in a parallel dimension, so no real polities and organizations are involved anyway. It's always been hard for you to be accurately political given your MC doesn't find out about trending topics until four years have passed. P.S. - I never saw any of your stuff on Royal Road's website. I, to this day, have a hard time remembering how I got turned on to this series years ago. I read it all from chapter 1 on your patreon when you were just starting the 2nd book, I think. And this is not how I normally go about things. It still kind of bothers me to this day. But my point was that Royal Road's algorithm never threw your fiction out in the first fifteen pages of whatever I was looking at, which is kind of messed up on its own.

Eidetic Eidolon

I use fbreader's generic british female voice for literally everything (when I'm not sitting in front of a screen). The problem with audiobooks for me is that they are incredibly slow compared to reading that I get bored, and the narrator switching with voices messes up my brain's "imaginator." I find that one slightly mechanical voice with a dead tone gives me a much better reading experience. The pace is fast enough, and my imagination does the heavy lifting naturally, similar to if I was actually reading the text.

Eidetic Eidolon

ZOMG, dude. Your new website finally worked for me. What are you doing? Everything is so easy to find and nicely organized. Have you never seen a modern website? It's supposed to be a scavenger hunt. People need to feel an accomplishment when they get to a chapter. You're doing it all wrong. LOL. Edit - Just to be clear, none of this is trying to subtly throw shade about the website being down or anything. When the announcement dropped I was at work. So the first few times I clicked the link, it was probably my employer's setup stopping me.

Neptune

dw man, we've got your back

Bruno Ignacio

actually crazy, even more when a theme of the history is max getting spanked becaues of his political mischief

Ricky Kukowski

Right!!! There has been fallout for his stances throughout the series.

Reifi

Wow, I had no idea it was because of all that. I was shocked and admittedly felt a little mad when I checked in for the usual update on Royal Road and saw that post there, I'd been reading since the very first book and grabbing the e-books as they'd been releasing. I got over it after a couple of days and realised that I was being a bit unreasonable and you probably just needed to earn a living from the millions of words you'd already given me to read so I signed up here. Seeing this post has sent me down a 30 minute rabbit hole and left me with a lot less respect for Royal Road. I hope it all ends up being a positive signal booster for you and the series Ted after the dust settles. All the best.

Ted Steel

I think that's an understandable first reaction, tbh, but to be completely clear, I was very happy with the situation as it was. A certain percentage of readers found the story, read most of it on RR, moved to Patreon. Everyone else could read for free. Great model, why change? This new world is uncertain and while it could end up better, there's a 95% chance it will end up worse. But whatever. If this is the only way to write exactly what I want, this is the way it has to be!

Reifi

Yeah, I guess it probably does just make it harder. It's frustrating that the crap we have to deal with in reality bleeds into spaces you'd think would be fairly insulated from it considering its fiction writing, or maybe thats naïve of me too. If you don't like someone's fictional world, just don't read it and all that jazz. I'm sure you've already heard it on repeat all week so I'll leave it there. More positively, book 1 of DoF has been great so far. I'm trying to ration myself to a chapter every other day so I don't blast through everything immediately. Super keen as always to see where it goes Ted.

George Magalhães

Hey guys, just joined Patreon and I would love to join discord as well, but the link keep saying that is invalid. Is there another way to join?

George Magalhães

It worked, thank you so much! And I love the series, keep up the amazing work!!