Where it comes from
Clubs and federations: club websites and news feeds, and national football associations, for statements and squad lists.
Reporters: football desks, local papers and club reporters at established outlets, read through their public feeds.
Match data: team sheets about 50 minutes before kick-off, and who played after the final whistle.
We read these around the clock. We follow each site’s robots.txt, identify ourselves honestly, and never go past a paywall. When an article is paywalled, we work from the headline and the summary the outlet publishes.
How we write it
Our own words. Each story is written from the reports, sentence by sentence; the small numbers after a sentence point to the reports it came from. We quote a source in six words or fewer.
Official beats reported. A club statement or the manager outranks a reporter. When a newer report disagrees with the official line, we show both and say reports differ.
The pitch beats talk. If a player is on the team sheet, that game shows him in the squad, whatever was said before. If he plays, his injury is closed.
No invented numbers. We only give a return date when a source states one. “Several weeks” stays several weeks. Without live data we never guess a score or a minute.
People check the hard cases. When a name could be two players, or we are not sure what a report says, a person reviews it before it appears. We also check a random share of everything else.