Just as football clubs get rid of their under-performing players in the summer, BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) has shut down Rivals.net, a network of fansites covering all 92 Football League clubs and part of the Football365 group of sites it bought in 2007.

A Sky spokesman (via NMA) blamed a lack of revenue: “Unfortunately Rivals.net wasn’t performing as well as we’d hoped. Therefore, the decision was made to close it.” Popular news site Football365.com is unaffected and Sky of course runs its own Skysports.com.

—MirrorFootball.co.uk: But as one dies, another is born: Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) is preparing a new standalone football site, MirrorFootball.co.uk, which will go live when the new season kicks off in August. It will combine club-by-club news coverage with a collection of historical news stories and pictures from Mirror Group Newspapers’ 100-year old archive. The Mirror says the site makes it “the first true national newspaper sports desk on the web” by filing stories online first, writing blogs and using the ubiquitous Twitter—though papers including the Telegraph and Guardian will no doubt dispute that claim. There will be video and audio content from the Mirror’s journalists and star pundits.

But why does Trinity want a separate football site when Mirror.co.uk/football already has decent coverage and would be a perfectly good platform for more content? The orthodoxy of the new Fleet Street has for years been to expand online within the same domain to help increase an online brand ID—but there must be something Trinity’s marketing people know that we don’t about the commercial success of standalone online newspaper sites.

—ESPNSoccernet: Meanwhile US sports broadcaster ESPN (NYSE: DIS) is hiring a London-based assistant editor for its ESPNSoccernet site ahead of its debut as a UK sports broadcaster next season. It might not necessarily signal expansion, but the Disney-owned company will no doubt want to increase its UK-focused online presence alongside its forthcoming subscription channel.

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