How it works

01

What this is

The Football Newsroom is an independent, non-commercial football news aggregator. Every two hours it reads the public feeds of 244 outlets in 24 languages, groups what they publish into stories, and tells you who broke each one and who did their own reporting.

It is not affiliated with any league, club, federation or publisher. No outlet can pay to appear, to rank higher or to be left out.

02

How a story is built

1. 1

   Read

   Every two hours we fetch the public feeds of every outlet on our list, then drop anything that is not about football, and anything promoting gambling.

2. 2

   Group

   Articles about the same event become one story, across outlets and across languages: a transfer reported in Madrid, Milan and Istanbul is one story, not three.

3. 3

   Order

   Inside each story, reports are lined up by the time we first saw them. The earliest is who broke it, shown in red: the only red on the site.

4. 4

   Check

   Each later outlet is marked independent if it did its own reporting, adding a detail nobody before it had, or as repeating someone else if it did not.

5. 5

   Rank

   The front page is ordered automatically, by independent reporting, spread across countries and freshness, with light weighting by topic. An outlet doing its own reporting counts for several times more than one repeating it, so volume alone cannot buy the top of the page.

1. 1
   Who broke it. The earliest report we saw, in red. The only red on the site.
2. 2
   The publisher's words. Headline and summary are quoted from one article, never rewritten, and linked to it.
3. 3
   The trail. Every outlet, in the order we saw them, drawn here as one block each. Filled blocks are reporting; hollow blocks are volume. On the front page it opens from the outlet count.
4. 4
   The spread. How many outlets and languages carry it, and how many of them did their own reporting.

03

Who did the reporting

Behind every story's outlet count is its trail: every outlet, in the order we saw them, each marked with what it did. Drawn as blocks, each is one of five kinds.

• B
  Broke it. The earliest report of the story by our clock, citing nobody upstream.
• +
  Added a fact. Brought at least one detail that no earlier report had: its own reporting.
• O
  Official. A result or a club statement. Identical wording is normal here, so it is not held against anyone.
• =
  Adds nothing new. Cites nobody, but adds nothing an earlier report did not already have. Not provably independent.
• ·
  Echo of someone upstream. Attributed to, or copied from, an earlier report.

Filled blocks are reporting. Hollow blocks are volume. Five hollow blocks is not a big story: it is one story, printed five times.

04

The trust badges

Each story carries one of five words, a one-line answer to does this stand up?, built from the reporting above. Tap the outlet count beside it on the front page to read the sentence behind the word and every outlet in order.

Corroborated (N)

N outlets each did their own reporting and added a detail nobody before them had. It counts independence, not agreement.

Official

A result or a club or federation statement, carried by two or more outlets. It is on the record, so identical wording is normal.

Official release

Published by the league, federation or club itself. A primary source speaking for itself: not a scoop, and not independent confirmation either.

Single source

One outlet has it, or several do and only one of them did any reporting. Not wrong, just not confirmed yet.

Echo

Every outlet traces back to one report, so the number of outlets is not evidence.

05

Whose words

Every headline and summary on the site is the publisher's own words, quoted from one article per story and always linked to it. We pick sentences; we never rewrite them, and we never publish a story without the link to the original.

When the quoted article is not in English, the headline may be machine-translated. It is then labelled translated, and the original is one click away. A headline we did not translate is shown as published and marked with its language, for example ES · original.

06

What we don't do

07

Limitations

This is an automated newsroom, and it gets things wrong in ways worth knowing.

• Grouping is automatic. It can split one story in two, or merge two different stories into one.
• First seen is our clock, not a verdict. We can only see a report once we fetch it, so broke it means first in our records. It does not guarantee who published first, and an outlet we do not read may have had it earlier.
• Independent is not the same as agreeing. Two outlets can each do their own reporting and still contradict each other. Nothing here checks that.
• We do not fact-check. A summary is the publisher's words. If the publisher got it wrong, so does the summary.
• Translation coverage is partial. Some languages are translated, others are shown as published.
• Coverage is uneven. We read far more outlets in some countries and languages than others, so a story from a thinly covered region can look weaker than it is. When we carry too few outlets on a story's beat to judge it, the sentence behind its badge says so.
• Scores come from third-party data. They may be delayed or wrong; the official competition source always wins.
• Feeds fail. On any run some outlets do not answer. Their reports reach us in a later edition, if the feed still carries them.

08

Sources

Every outlet whose feed answered on the latest run (02 Oct 2026, 22:00 UTC): 228 outlets in 48 countries and 24 languages. 16 more feeds did not answer this time and are not listed. Each name opens the outlet's own site.

• English86
• Spanish22
• French17
• Italian15
• Dutch14
• German14
• Turkish9
• Portuguese8
• Japanese7
• Polish5
• Arabic4
• Romanian4
• Croatian3
• Greek3
• Norwegian3
• Russian3
• Bulgarian2
• Korean2
• Swedish2
• Czech1
• Danish1
• Finnish1
• Hungarian1
• Indonesian1

09

Contact

Corrections, a story grouped wrongly, an outlet credited in error, a feed we should read, or anything else:

[email protected]

Publishers with a question about how we quote and link your work: the same address.

• The weekday email
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• Past issues