Truer Lies: Ranking The Papers.

By: chris | July 7th, 2009

Summer is perhaps the worst time of year when it comes to football – at least for fans of the European variety. Not only are the games on hold, but we have to sit through mindless transfer rumor after mindless transfer rumor. The stuff that you know must be made up, but you end up clicking on the link anyway because one must be allowed to dream, right? So the good folks at Football Transfer League have been keeping track of the Brit-based transfer rumors for a few years now and have devised an accuracy report based on each of the major papers, giving us a keener eye.

(Those who follow the ins & outs of British football may have heard of FTL. They’re quite good as an aggregate for transfer rumors, but have sort of scoped their focus in recent times.)

These are for the newspapers and each has a separate web site, but the journalistic standards of each outfit, we can assume, are largely similar, so it’s fair enough to compare for those who don’t pick up the hard copy.

[Link]

The actual percentages aren’t “what percentage of rumors are valid?”. It’s more “which were reported beforehand – or which successfully weeded out the flotsam and some of the jetsam – and thus had validity?” – and from that you can sort of deduce which papers have actual sources and which tend to find their rumors after a violent shaking of a magic 8 ball.

Of course it’s not perfect, as some perfectly legitimate rumors haven’t come true for a variety of reasons (hence the low percentages in some cases), but it’s still an interesting look nonetheless.

The Daily Record is Scottish, so the best of the real bigs is The Guardian (which plenty of our readers had already figured out). And then way down the other end is News of the World (ignore them) while the Daily Mirror wins the “throw shit against a wall and see how much sticks” award.

Now it’d be great to unwrap two results from this:

i. They need to expand the study to encompass all of Europe. Find out which papers from which countries are big on validity and those which, well, aren’t. Early estimations would have papers from Spain & Italy in no danger of approaching double digits and a host of journos with fabulous job security provided their imaginations are still in quasi-working order.

ii. A commission for transfer rumor accountability. If you report something which turns out to be fabricated, it’s a swift and severe punishment at the ready. A day in a small enclosed space with an angry swarms of wasps, Vinnie Jones and a mongoose should work.

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