Editorial standards & verification policy

Matchday Global publishes football news in three editorial tiers. Each has its own sourcing rules, voice, and verification standard. We do not blur the tiers.

Tier 1 — Original editorial

Bylined work by our named masthead. Match previews, post-match reports, transfer analysis, tactical breakdowns, predictions, opinion. The byline is a real human, identifiable on their author page, with a public photo, bio, beat, and X/social handle.

Sources for Tier 1: club announcements, player social channels, agent statements on record, press conferences, pre-arranged interviews, and provider data feeds (API-Football, SportMonks, football-data.org). Numerical facts (goal counts, xG, league positions) are pulled from the data feed; named-source quotes are attributed to the publisher we observed them in. We do not re-publish other journalists’ work as our own.

Tier 2 — Wire summaries

We aggregate breaking football news from named global publishers (BBC Sport, Sky, ESPN, The Guardian, Football Italia, Football España) and African desks (Soccer Laduma, Kick Off, Complete Sports, Hespress, Morocco World News, Pulse Sports Nigeria, Ghana Soccer Net). Wire summaries appear on /news with the original publisher named in the body and credited in a footer line.

Wire summaries are not original reporting. They are paraphrased, MDG-voiced summaries of headlines from those publishers, intended as a single surface where a reader can keep track of football across the world. We never claim a wire summary as a Matchday Global scoop.

Wire bodies are expanded from the source seed by an AI assistant (Anthropic Claude Sonnet) under strict no-fabrication rules — see our AI use & disclosure policy for the exact rules and the runtime filter that enforces them.

Tier 3 — Live data

Scores, fixtures, lineups, standings, top scorers, and assist tables are pulled from licensed provider feeds. We name the provider when asked and we display the “updated X seconds ago” timestamp on every live surface so the reader can judge freshness. If a provider experiences an outage, we say so — we do not paper over a feed gap with reader-confusing fallback data.

What we never do

• Fabricate quotes. No invented “according to sources” speakers. If a quote isn’t in the seed we published, it’s not in the body.
• Invent statistics. Goal counts, transfer fees, contract lengths, league positions are reported only when present in the source or in a verified data feed.
• Re-write other publishers as our own. Wire summaries credit the source publisher; we never strip the byline of the outlet that broke a story.
• Hide commercial relationships. Affiliate links are labelled as such. Sponsored editorial is labelled “Sponsored” with the partner named on the unit.
• Run scrapers behind paywalls. We do not aggregate from publishers who block aggregation in their robots.txt or terms of use.

When we get it wrong

Mistakes happen. When they do, we correct them visibly on the article page with a dated “Corrected on …” note and (if the error materially changed a reader’s understanding) a short summary of what changed. See our corrections policy for the full process and how to flag an error.

Independence

No commercial partner has any influence over our editorial line. Affiliate partners (1xBet, BetGr8) do not preview articles before publication, do not have veto over coverage, and do not pay for favourable framing. Predictions are generated from a public Poisson model against real bookmaker odds — the math is documented on /predictions/strategies, the model output is published whether or not it favours an affiliate partner’s odds.