The dot-com bubble was fueled by a belief that the internet would revolutionize the world in the same way the printing press did. This led to the founding of many internet companies, some with unlikely origins like Soccernet, which was started by 12-year old Tom Hadfield as a hobby to post football scores online. As interest and usage of the internet exploded, Soccernet grew rapidly in popularity and value, benefitting from the hype and inflated valuations of the dot-com boom. Eventually Disney acquired Soccernet for $40 million, an example of the huge sums being paid for internet companies during the peak of the speculative bubble.

1. The dot.com bubble
The dot.com boom
Narrator
More usually, bubbles are connected to innovation and one incident of recent times that
combined the shock of the new with a bubble of belief was the dot-com boom.
Mariana
‘The dot-com revolution was associated with people talking about the new economy, that
somehow economies, because of the great productivity enhancement that the IT revolution
brought about, that somehow we could even avoid the business cycle – no more busts, just
booms.’
Narrator
Based on a belief that the internet would revolutionise the way the world worked, it helped
create businesses from the most unlikely beginnings.
Greg Hadfield
‘Soccernet was almost an accident really; it was entirely down to my son Tom who was then
aged 12.
He, like me, had always been interested in football; the puzzle was why he kept running in
and out of the living room every Saturday afternoon, and it was because he was memorising
the football results, going back to his computer, posting them on a server in Chicago,
unbeknown to us, and thousands of people around the world were finding it and looking at the
results.
And this was not just before Google – this was really before Yahoo. And way back in the days
when there was barely the web. He had to sit there with a dictionary on his knee, trying to
make sure that he spelled the words correctly, because no one knew for years that Tom was
only a 12-year-old boy.
Reading up on what was happening in the States at the time, I got the feeling that this
possibly was one of the great inventions of mankind, that this was going to change the world
in the way Gutenberg had changed it in print. So we built the brand from scratch.
I had to stay up ’til one, two in the morning, and often having to rely on Tom to stay up ’til 10,
11 o’clock at night after he should have been doing his homework and gone to bed, to put
Barnsley 1 – Huddersfield Nil on a wet Wednesday.
And it was, it was exciting virally, millions of football fans around the world who were joining
the internet, getting connected, spread it by, literally by, I would say word of mouth, but of
course it was word of email.
Eventually it became a hot property.
And big business started to be interested and big money.
Everyone was talking about the internet.
There were ludicrous valuations. There were people who didn’t know how to build but knew
how to buy.
I still bump into people who I offered, I think it was 30 per cent of Soccernet, whatever that
meant, for £60,000.’

2. Narrator
Soccernet was benefitting from the dot-com hype that would ultimately lead to an explosive
worldwide bubble.
Rory Cellan Jones
‘If you’ve got a story of a 16 or 17 year old creating a business in a back bedroom on his
home PC which is suddenly making him and his family worth millions, that’s obviously going
to be attractive to the media.’
Michael Jackson
‘The media’s job is to sell papers – there’s no point saying “It’s really boring, the economy’s
only growing at two per cent but everything’s fine.”
You know, why are you interested in that? You are much more interested in “The housing
market’s booming” or “The housing market’s declining” or “The housing market’s declined and
we see green shoots.”’
James Montier
By and large the average media I think unfortunately is involved in fuelling the bubble. And all
that does is just to create an enormous of noise rather than actually create any information.
US news archive
At 11:00am this morning the company stock went public and Wall Street went bonkers.
Initially offered at a price of 28 dollars a share, Netscape shot up to 72 within minutes.
Greg Hadfield
“Even to me, the valuations were crazy. But you went along with them obviously because
there was a certain amount of kudos for having a valuation.
You don’t realise you’re in a bubble. You realise that life is exciting, that the stock market is
going up, and it wasn’t just the dot-com boom that was fuelling the stock market, there was a
general upturn.
In 1999, Soccernet is bought by Disney, by ESPN Disney; and it sold for 40 million dollars.’
Archive sync
Q: How many companies have you run so far in your life?
Tom: Well I started off with a football internet site when I was 12 and I am now working on an
educational internet site. Schoolsnet.
Q: And how old did you say you were?
Tom: I’m 17.
Greg Hadfield
‘It all started with a 12-year-old boy doing it himself and then involving his dad who did do his
fair share of work. And will probably be forever known as the father of Tom Hadfield and I’m
totally happy with that.’