If you're a brand builder, you'd have warned me off the name from the start.

Two 11-letter words? Eight syllables? Am I f***ing crazy??

Probably. But hear me out.

A "magnificent irrelevance" is how Hugh McIlvanney once described sport.

McIlvanney was a British sportswriter who worked for The Observer and The Sunday Times for more than 50 years. If it's possible to love a gruff and possibly unlikeable Scotsman you've never met, well then, I love Hugh McIlvanney. I'm also led to believe he was as far from the fan-with-typewriter image of the sports journalist as you could get. (Newspaper sports sections have been dismissed as "The Toy Department" by people doing more important work, in politics, say, or economics, or some other career misstep.)

There's another good story about McIlvanney. Once, hearing some of his colleagues cheering for an underdog, he couldn't hide his scorn. When challenged, he replied, "You like giant-killers. I like giants."

McIlvanney was a giant. And he took his role, and sport, seriously.

But sport is serious.

Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of the great Liverpool F.C. team of the 1960s and '70s, was only quarter-joking here:

"Somebody said football's a matter of life and death to me. I said to him, 'Listen, it's more important than that.'"

There are winners and losers in all sports, but those who reduce sport to wins or losses, or statistics, or just an excuse for us against them, miss an essential part of the thing.

Sport is about stories. Sport is about people. Sport is about soul.

And even in this age of instant video, sixty seconds or less, with jump cuts enough to leave a wound, it's still the writers who capture sport's magnificence better than anyone.

Over the past 100 years, much of the best writing on anything has been writing about sport.

Sport is magnificent, and yes, in the greater scheme of things, it might be irrelevant.

But its magnificence and its irrelevance are why it's so important.

This project, Magnificent Irrelevance, is an attempt to honour the sports, and the stories, and the writing, and the writers.

Its promise is a simple one.

Every story published here will aim to be standalone, standout, and worthy of the two most valuable things you have in the world: your attention, and your time.

Thank you for being here.

Shane Breslin

Founder, Magnificent Irrelevance