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Guide to sources

Toast

Established Member
During silly season we get bombarded with information from tons of different sources. One thing I find is that I often don't know exactly how reliable a source is, especially when it's a source from a country that I'm not overly familiar with.

So by way of experiment I thought it'd be interesting to see if we could use of our combined knowledge to create a a guide to sources. We can make use of our diverse backgrounds to create a list of sources and their reliability, possibly by country, which would make it easier for us all to assess the credibility of a rumour.

By way of example, I know which Dutch sources are reliable, I have some knowledge of English sources but I couldn't tell you which Spanish or Italian sources to believe.

So... let me know what you think. If we can get a fair few people to contribute their knowledge I'd be more than happy to create and update the list.

EDIT: I've taken the liberty of making a start.

Based on the stats from the website supplied by CurryFlavoured (for which thanks), I've taken the liberty of drawing up an initial list. Please not that EVERYTHING is up for debate. The whole point of this exercise is to arrive at a reasonably accurate index and the best way to do so is through debate. It's a small start, but I'm sure there's much more to add.


So let me know what you think. Do you think a source should be in a different category? Are the categories wrong? Do you have information to add? Argue your case below. When adding non-British sources please state how you know they are reliable. In this case I've added Dutch sources since I'm quite familiar with them, being Dutch myself.


Dutch sources

Reliable
Voetbal International
De Telegraaf (regarding Ajax players)
Eindhovens Dagblad (regarding PSV players)
Tubantia (regarding FC Twente players)

British Sources

Extremely reliable
BBC / Ornstein
Arsenal.com

Fairly reliable – they get a third of the rumours right.
The Times

Somewhat reliable – they call between 25-30% of rumours correctly.
Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
The Herald
The Independent
The Scotsman

Somewhat unreliable – they get less than a quarter of rumours right.
The Sun
Daily Mail
Daily Mirror

Unreliable – they get some things right, but don’t get your hopes up.
Metro
The People
News of the World

Very unreliable – basically fiction
Caught Offside
Talk Sport
Footy Latest
Bleacher Report
Sports Direct News
Goal.com
The Express
Daily Star

French sources

German sources

Spanish sources

Italian sources

Twitter sources
 

Dokaka

AM's resident Hammer
To add to this, I posted this: <a class="postlink-local" href="https://arsenal-mania.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=323774" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">viewtopic.php?f=13&t=323774</a> ages ago under suggestions. It'd be nice to be able to sort the legit links from the obvious BS by putting the source in the title when you create one.

Too many threads get bumped/created with the only source being The Daily Mail, Mirror, The Sun, Caughtoffside and all that ****, which then gets fueled by random Twitter "ITKs" adding fuel to the fire.
 

spartandre217

Established Member
I was actually thinking about putting together a spreadsheet of sources, calls they've made, accuracy and how far in advance they called something before it was announced officially.


I wanna do the Twitter sauces.
 

Toast

Established Member
I have no problem with threads getting bumped with poor sources (I do it a lot :lol:) but I do believe things would run a lot smoother if people had an easy overview of what's probably bullshit and what's more likely to be true.

Adding the original source in the thread title could work perhaps, but is problematic when new sources are added since the mods would continously have to change the thread title.

One advantage of the list I'm proposing is that one can very easily add a source's reliability when a new link is posted e.g. "Source: Cauhgtoffside - very unreliable" or something like that.
 

Toast

Established Member
spartandre217 said:
I was actually thinking about putting together a spreadsheet of sources, calls they've made, accuracy and how far in advance they called something before it was announced officially.


I wanna do the Twitter sauces.

It'd be awesome if we could finally assess the reliabillity of supposed ITK's. Info from them is debated more heavily than anything else.
 

CurryFlavoured

Established Member
Good idea, crap like CaughtOffside and TalkSport shouldn't warrant new threads or bumping old threads.

I used to follow a website that had a great record of paper rumours. It listed the players linked to a team, how many papers had linked them to the team and the % success rate for each paper on player transfers. It just disappeared a year or so ago though.
 

Toast

Established Member
CurryFlavoured said:
Good idea, crap like CaughtOffside and TalkSport shouldn't warrant new threadsor bumping old threads.

I used to follow a website that had a great record of paper rumours. It listed the players linked to a team, how many papers had linked them to the team and the % success rate for each paper on player transfers. It just disappeared a year or so ago though.

Oops... that's a nice illustration of the problem. I didn't know Talksport was crap. Created a thread based on them today. My bad. :|

Shame that website's dissapeared though. That would've been very handy right about now.
 

GDeep™

League is very weak
I consider myself an expert on this, so I suggest after my post we lock the thread and use my post as a referance to what sources are good/bad.

Your caught offside, tribal football, bleacher report, daily mail, Talksport, Sports Direct News etc are a pile of ****.

Anyone other than John Cross on the Daily Mirror isn't worth a read either, stories by Steve stammers for example.

Guardian, Telegraph, Express, BBC, Sky Sports are semi reliable and worth a post.

Most of the journos on Twitter know their stuff, Marcotti, Balague, Hunter, Laurens, Honegstein, Di Marzio etc. Guys like Geoff and that Dean fella have shown enough for their info to be considered semi reliable and posted on here.

The big foreign sources are fine too, Bild, Marca, As, Lequipe etc.

The best thing to do if you're unsure, is to PM me before you post and I'll tell you if your source is worth the bother, this will lead to a more refined, current, and interesting transfer section.
 

DanAust

Active Member
Id rather anyone post anything they consider to be news worthy, BS or not, I like deciding that for myself; but having a guide for people who wants some back ground seems like a decent idea.
 

CurryFlavoured

Established Member
I had a bit of a look and found the old site I used to follow, it's a bit different to what it used to be but has some useful rumour statistics.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.footballtransferleague.co.uk/newspaper_statistics.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.footballtransferleague.co.uk ... stics.aspx</a> - % of successful rumours for each UK paper. Don't know how accurate they are in relation to keeping track of all this but it seems ok.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.footballtransferleague.co.uk/football_club.aspx?football_club=Arsenal" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.footballtransferleague.co.uk ... ub=Arsenal</a> - stats on Arsenal rumours, number of papers linking us to a player, % success rate of these papers in relation to Arsenal etc.
 
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spartandre217

Established Member
Toast said:
CurryFlavoured said:
Good idea, crap like CaughtOffside and TalkSport shouldn't warrant new threadsor bumping old threads.

I used to follow a website that had a great record of paper rumours. It listed the players linked to a team, how many papers had linked them to the team and the % success rate for each paper on player transfers. It just disappeared a year or so ago though.

Oops... that's a nice illustration of the problem. I didn't know Talksport was crap. Created a thread based on them today. My bad. :|

Shame that website's dissapeared though. That would've been very handy right about now.


Transfermarkt do something similar in their forums.
 

SA Gunner

Hates Tierney And Wants Him Sold Immediately
Moderator

Country: South Africa

Player:Nketiah
GDeep :lol:

You are semi reliable though.

This is a good idea, what I found is that Twitter sources are great. Of course this is based on track record.

Would make my transfer window far more relaxing :)
 

Rex Stone

Long live the fighters
Trusted ⭐

Country: Wales
Several of the semi-reputable papers like the Guardian also have "Paper-rounds" where they round up transfer information from other papers.

I've seen in various threads, "Player X is linked with Arsenal according to the guardian". Where in reality, the Guardian's reporting that the star or sun is reporting we're interested in them.

That one really annoys me.
 

Jury

A-M's drunk uncle
It's simple. If anyone wants to quote what, in their opinion, is a reliable source with proven form, just state it in the post. We don't really need lists. We'll learn as we go.
 

wengerboy

Established Member
Love this idea. I hope focus is on arsenal rumours because sources are more accurate on some clubs more than others. I offering my help with anything.
 

Floating

Established Member
We should create tiers of reliability:

Tier 1: As reliable as they come. Examples: BBC/Ornstein, Arsenal.com
Tier 2: Usually reliable but not certain. Guardian, Di Marzio, etc
Tier 3: Occasionally reliable. Mirror, sometimes Goal.com
Tier 4: Usually garbage. Daily Mail, CaughtOffside, TalkSport, etc.
 

Toast

Established Member
Floating said:
We should create tiers of reliability:

Tier 1: As reliable as they come. Examples: BBC/Ornstein, Arsenal.com
Tier 2: Usually reliable but not certain. Guardian, Di Marzio, etc
Tier 3: Occasionally reliable. Mirror, sometimes Goal.com
Tier 4: Usually garbage. Daily Mail, CaughtOffside, TalkSport, etc.

Yup, that's the idea.

wengerboy said:
Love this idea. I hope focus is on arsenal rumours because sources are more accurate on some clubs more than others. I offering my help with anything.

It would be Arsenal focused, of course. Don't care about other clubs.

AnthonyG said:
This won't work. The problem is not the sources, it's idiots.

The only thing this thread will do is mess up my TR section. Oh, and show why GDeep got demoted in the first place.

The trash-heap has spoken.

The problem is partly the sources printing ****, but mainly it's people not being able to distinguish what's **** information from what's possibly true, thus leading to pointless speculation and false hope. A guide will help.
 

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