About the site

HattersMatters began life as a paper fanzine and was the creation of Andrew Barlow and Paul Hodgson. The free publication was handed out at the High Peak Hatters supporters meetings held at the White Hart pub in New Mills inside another fanzine called ‘Top Hat And Tales’.

Our first attempt at a web site took inspiration from Martin White’s fan run website called The Mad Hatters. After only a few months of being online we were asked to join the Rivals network and be their supplier of Stockport County based news and views following the departure of their previous Stockport County site editor.

In 2008 the Rivals network was acquired by Sky and promises of some much needed network improvements failed to materialise and this resulted in a number of publishers opting to leave the Rivals network to join ClubFanzine – a network set up by former Rivals publishers.

Although County enjoyed a lot of success on the pitch following our first promotion in a decade following a play-off final victory over Rochdale at Wembley, the same could not be said for our site as things didn’t quite go according to plan with ClubFanzine. The launch had been rushed and as a result not as many publishers joined the site as promised so there was a lack of visitors and minimal interaction with fans from other clubs. A personal decision was made to stop producing the HattersMatters website in September 2008 until we decided to give things another go in June 2010 on a new network called FansNetwork.

A similar scenario occurred on FansNetwork as not all teams were represented so once again there was a lack of visitors and interaction with other fans so it meant we were spending a lot of time updating the site for very little reward. Our last article was published on the FansNetwork site in December 2010.

We are now back online in an independent capacity and have turned our attentions to creating a historical database to show various bits of information to do with Stockport County’s history.