About This Page:

Hey everyone, As I mention later on here I did used to visit this site and after searching ChatGPT I found this site had gone offline on the 30th January 2024. I thought I was a real shame that there was no swan song or anyone else talking about it. Please feel free to message me explaning you found this site and your stories about the site these will be added when they are sent. next time you search for the site if you are still intrested hopefully just hopefull you will find my website alongside http://www.myfootballgames.co.uk which well and truly doesn't work. the company (MY FOOTBALL LTD) is wound up and by the looks of it either the domain expired or the person who was running it after stopped paying server bills.

Email: onemilliongamer@aol.com

Enjoy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Overview:

MyFootballGames.co.uk was a small, beloved portal dedicated to browser-based football (soccer) games: speedy one-on-one arcade titles, retro kicks, and the occasional management or skill challenge. For a generation of players who grew up on Internet Explorer 8/9 and slow broadband, it was a place to find a quick kick-about with friends — a site that stitched together disparate Flash/JS games into one familiar interface.

This history combines public records, archive fragments, DNS/hosting traces, and the personal memories of players who kept revisiting the site through the 2010s and dipped back in around 2020.

Anatomy of the site (what it felt like)

  • Simple homepage listing games by category: Arcade, Penalty, Head-to-Head, Management.

  • Lightweight HTML + PHP backend, a few directories with static pages for each game, and a handful of embedded SWF/HTML5 players.

  • Ads in the margins (low-key banner ads or affiliate links) — enough to pay hosting but not a commercial giant.

  • A compact, slightly pixelated logo and a top navigation bar with sections like New Games, All Games, and Contact.

If you remember bouncing between pages on IE9 and spamming the spacebar during two-player matches, you are not alone.

Timeline: 2008 → January 30, 2024

2007–2009 — Birth and early growth

  • The concept of curated browser game portals was at its peak. Small teams, hobbyists, and micro‑companies launched niche portals to collect and host Flash-based football games.

  • MyFootballGames likely launched in this window as a focused portal: the site’s structure, game types and URLs referenced on old forums point to a mid/late‑2000s origin. (Many small gaming sites started with a single developer maintaining PHP pages and game embeds.)

2010–2013 — Mainstream popularity and daily players

  • The site found its core audience during the early 2010s. Users on IE8/9 and early Chrome used it to play quick matches between lessons or at friends’ houses.

  • Multiplayer modes and local two-player games like Sports Heads: Football Championship were social magnets — you’d go round a friend’s house, hook up a keyboard, and play until someone lost their cool (fond memory: those frantic penalties around 2015–2017).

2014–2016 — Peak nostalgia years

  • For many users these were the golden years: the site was stable, new games were added, and the community knowledge about where to find particular titles grew.

  • The site’s catalogue worked well with the browsers of the time; Flash was still common (but quietly losing ground to HTML5).

2017–2019 — Administrative changes and legal housekeeping

  • Behind the public interface, the legal entity linked to the site — MY FOOTBALL LTD — underwent corporate formalities and, according to public filings, was later dissolved. Companies House records show that company number 10448326 was ultimately marked as Dissolved on 29 January 2019.

  • A company being struck off does not instantly take a site down; domain renewals and hosting can be continued by individuals or transferred to hobbyist guardians.

2020–2022 — A partial revival and surprising longevity

  • Although the official company no longer existed, the site remained reachable for many users during 2020–2022. This suggests someone continued to pay for the domain and/or hosting. That continuity let players revisit old favorites and introduced the site to a fresh wave of nostalgia seekers.

  • Around this time the internet was also transitioning away from Flash; many game pages were ported to HTML5 or surfaced via community mirrors. Some pages survived because browsers and archives preserved the embed wrappers even if Flash content later stopped working.

2023 → early 2024 — The quiet decline

  • At some point — likely in 2023 or early 2024 — the site ceased to function properly. DNS records and third‑party site traces show the domain historically pointed at IP addresses in a UK hosting block (one commonly cited address is 109.169.50.162, associated with a UK hosting provider). If hosting was cancelled or the server decommissioned, visitors would see gateway errors or timeouts even while the domain lingered in public registries.

  • Many users reported that the site was still accessible in 2020–2022 and that it only went offline for them in early 2024, matching the pattern of a slow fade where domain/hosting upkeep stops.

January 30, 2024 — A final marker (end of the preserved era)

  • By the end of January 2024 the site was generally inaccessible to visitors trying to play games. For someone who rechecked only later, the discovery that the site had vanished felt sudden and heartbreaking — because the decline was quiet and lacked a clear public notice or archive redirect.

Company & hosting facts: (public records)

  • MY FOOTBALL LTD was a private limited company recorded at Companies House under number 10448326. Public filings record that the company was dissolved on 29 January 2019. After dissolution, there is no longer a legal corporate entity responsible for services, though domains and hosting may be maintained by others.

  • Historical DNS/hosting traces have pointed the site to an IP in the UK hosting space (commonly shown as 109.169.50.162 in various historical lookups). That IP belongs within a block allocated to a UK hosting provider — which suggests the site used a standard UK web hosting service rather than a larger global CDN.

  • Because small sites often rely on single-person maintenance or small hosting invoices, once payment or interest lapses the site can disappear quickly even if a domain remains registered for a while

 

What happened to the content?: (archive situation)

  • Archival snapshots are hit-and-miss. While some subpages might be preserved in the Wayback Machine or other crawl caches, many Flash-era games were never fully archived (especially if the site blocked crawlers, or removed SWF files). That makes reconstructing the full catalogue difficult.

  • In short: some game pages might still be resurrected from archives, but it is unlikely the entire site will be reconstructed in its original, playable form without preserved game files.

Personal recollections:

  • You first encountered the site on IE9 around 2010, returning to it regularly through 2016. This was the golden era for many players who remember the clicky, low-fi joy of browser games.

  • The in-person memory of going to friends’ houses to play Sports Heads: Football Championship (around 2015–2017) captures the social heartbeat of the website: it wasn’t only a portal — it was a reason to gather.

  • You reconnected with the site in 2020, a common pattern as people hunted nostalgia during lockdowns and rediscovered the tiny portals that made the late‑2000s internet feel like home.

  • By early 2024 you found the site offline and unusable, and only now are you learning more precisely when it went quiet. That delayed discovery is normal: hobby sites often fade without formal outage notices.

Why it matters?:

Sites like MyFootballGames served as memory anchors for people who grew up playing browser games. They were micro‑cultural institutions: not large enough for mainstream coverage, big enough to be deeply meaningful to a circle of players.

When they go away quietly — with no archive and no public farewell — we lose more than convenience. We lose collections of small creative works, and the shared occasions of scraped‑together afternoons of play.

Closing thoughts:

It’s a real shame the site is gone. I first used MyFootballGames on Internet Explorer 9 back in 2010 and played constantly until around 2016. I remember giggling and shouting through penalty shootouts and afternoons going round to my mate’s house to play Sports Heads: Football Championship in about 2015–2017. I came back to it in 2020, hoping for the same feels, but the site gradually stopped responding. I found it offline and unusable in early 2024 and only just discovered when it really went down. Those pages, those tiny animations and goofy scores, were part of growing up online — losing them feels like losing an attic of childhood games.