Credentials

Welcome to the second issue of The Alborán.

I spent the past few weeks putting it together, and somewhere in the middle of that the size of the thing we have taken on came home to me. There are three of us, Alex, Ana and me, and between us we make the whole of it. We do not get everything right, and we will not pretend otherwise. But we believe in this kind of publication, the considered kind, the one that covers what we think you actually care about rather than what is easiest to sell. That belief is most of what keeps us at it.

It is worth saying what a month actually takes. Seven pieces in a month, and each one starts as little more than an idea before it asks weeks of us: the reading, the reporting, the visits to sit with someone and hear them out, the photographs that must be found, not grabbed, and the slower, unglamorous work of checking what we have been told and giving anyone we write about the chance to answer. Alongside all of that runs The Sessions, which has to be filmed, then edited, then carried out into the world so that people know it is there. None of it is quick, and none of it runs on its own. We would rather you saw that than not.

You will have seen that the weekly dispatches have started. That is where we want to bring you the competitions and the tournaments, the week-to-week pulse of the game between these longer issues. It is also a promise to ourselves to stay close to the sport as it is played now, and not only as it reads in retrospect.

One thing this month pleased me more than the rest. Last week we were granted press accreditation for the Premier Padel P1 in London. Alex and I travel down on Thursday, and our passes let us stay the full week. It matters more than a lanyard should, because it is a tour and a federation treating us as what we are trying to be: a publication that turns up. We hold the same accreditation for the Padel World Summit, and we mean to keep pushing at that door, because it is how we reach the people building this sport.

In this issue you meet Pato, who made a club in Castlemilk against the run of the numbers. He is one of several people building the game here whom we have been sitting down with, owners and operators whose stories will find their way into issues to come.

London gives us something else. The accreditation puts us within reach of some of the best players in the sport, and we will try to talk to as many of them as the week allows. Whatever we come back with, we will get to you as quickly as we can: through the Sessions podcast, in a form we think you have not heard from us before, through the weekly dispatch, or on social. We are also looking ahead to Dublin, and an Irish federation event this autumn.

I want to be straight with you about two things, because you should hear them from us.

The first is how we work. We do all of this around full-time jobs and everything else a life carries, and to hold ourselves to a journalistic standard on that footing, we use AI to help with the research. Not to write your world for you, and never to invent it, but to check that a claim is actually a claim before we print it. If we told you that playing three times a week gave you a ninety per cent chance of reaching a Premier Padel main draw, that would be nonsense, and there are a hundred quieter ways to print something untrue. The tools help us catch them. The reporting, the judgement and the words we stand behind are ours.

The second is money. For a publication like this to last, it will at some point have to carry advertising, and you will start to see some from around the third or fourth issue. We will not run advertorials, and we will not push flashy things into your face for the sake of it. We are a business, and we have costs to meet. But we will curate what appears here as carefully as we curate everything else, and we will not crowd the pages to do it.

One more thing. The podcast is live, on Apple, on Spotify, wherever you listen, and on YouTube. The companion is now called The B Side, where Alex sits longer with the people he has been speaking to. It is some of the best of what we make.

As ever, thank you to everyone who has read this far. If you have something to tell us, we would genuinely like to hear it: editors@alboransocialclub.com. And do follow us on social, where we keep the game turning over between issues; you will find the handle just below.

Thank you for being part of this, and for what it is becoming.

See you at the club.

Andy Galt

Follow The Alborán: @alboransocialclub