While compiling the list of the best of the best blogs to include in the 2009-2010 EPL Awards competition, I was struck by how few blogs from England are on my must-read list. I’m originally from the UK. And sure, I often find myself reading soccer blogs from the UK such as Zonal Marking, Some People Are On The Pitch and Fantasy Football Scout, but they represent such a small percentage of the tens of English soccer-related blogs I read each day scouring the ‘Net for news to share with you, the readers of EPL Talk.

The Guardian does such a good job with its blogs, so maybe some soccer supporters from England feel as if it’s not necessary to create their own. However, even before The Guardian had sport blogs, there was a lack of good soccer blogs from England, so The Guardian‘s perfection can’t explain that.

While the United States is a much larger country based on population, the number of people who are die-hard soccer fans has got to be less than the number in England. In the States, though, many of the blogs fill a void because of the lack of good soccer coverage in newspapers and in the media. If we in the States had to rely on traditional media such as television and local newspapers to follow our favorite Premier League team, we’d be clueless how their season was going.

But at the same time, I’m disappointed that there aren’t more quality soccer blogs from England. Many of them are club blogs instead of blogs that focus on a specific topic or a specific league. Living closer to the epicenter of the Premier League, it’s perhaps more understandable that soccer fans in England feel they need to support their team by creating a supporter’s blog. But that still doesn’t explain why we don’t see an abundance of quality soccer blogs from England on other topics.

Perhaps the reason was the expensive rates that companies such as BT Internet charged for broadband usage and the caps they created to limit the amount of bandwidth consumed. At least that’s what I experienced when I last visited my cousins in London when I was there in 2006. Nowadays, an unlimited broadband plan from BT is the equivalent of $43 a month.

Maybe I’m unrealistic, but I would expect to see a lot more quality blogs created and published in England.

Here’s a rundown of quality blogs from around the world and which country the chief blogger resides in:

England

• A Cultured Left Foot
• Fantasy Football Scout
• Harry Hotspur
• Off The Post
• Republik of Mancunia
• Some People Are On The Pitch
• The Onion Bag
• The Spoiler
• The Tomkins Times
• This Is Anfield
• Tottenham Blog
• True Colours
• Two Footed Tackle
• Two Hundred Percent
• Who Ate All The Pies
• Zonal Marking

Australia

• The Arsenal FC Blog

Canada

• A More Splendid Life

• ArseBlog

Pakistan

• Soccerlens

United States of America

• BigSoccer
• Dirty Tackle
• Du Nord
• Pitch Invasion
• Set Piece Analysts
• Soccer By Ives
• Studs Up
• The Global Game
• The Offside
• The Offside Rules
• The Original Winger
• The Run Of Play
• This Is American Soccer
• Unprofessional Foul

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’s meant to give you an idea of where many of the quality blogs originate from.

How do you explain why there are so few quality soccer blogs from England? Click the comments link below to share your opinion.

When you type the words “soccer blogs” into Google, the search engine returns a listing of 2.9 million pages indexed. Rather than wade through the massive amount of blogs, here are the top 5 blogs based on the number of subscribers to their Feedburner RSS feeds:

1. ArseBlog, 2,991 subscribers
2. Soccerlens, 1,565
3. EPL Talk, 466
4. Soccer Shout, 312
5. Throughball, 171

Sadly, Throughball.com is on hiatus. Whether Josh, the blogger, will return looks unlikely.The top 5 list was compiled by researching over 100 of the top soccer blogs. Only blogs that publicly feature on their web site the number of Feedburner RSS feeds they have were included.