Editorial standards
How we verify
The ARCHV is a football-history publication. We treat the game's present the way we treat its past, by checking it before we publish. This page sets out how we decide what to run, and how confident we are when we run it.
Two sources before we publish
Nothing goes up as fact on a single source, with one standing exception: on the NFL and Formula 1 desks, the league's own official record is enough on its own, and it is named on the page. Everywhere else, a claim, a fee, a date or a scoreline is checked against at least two independent outlets before we treat it as settled. Two write-ups of the same original scoop are not two sources; we want outlets that did the reporting separately.
Breaking news: the REPORTED tier
Transfer news moves faster than confirmation, and the best of it often breaks through one reporter. When a named journalist with a strong record breaks a story alone, we may run it marked REPORTED, with the reporter and outlet named every time.
REPORTED means one credible source and nothing more. It does not turn into confirmed because other sites have copied it. It hardens only when the club confirms, or a genuinely separate outlet reports the same thing.
CONFIRMED, REPORTED and RUMOUR say what they mean
Every desk entry carries a label that says how firm it is. CONFIRMED means two independent outlets, or the official body for NFL and Formula 1 results. REPORTED means one named reporter, named on the page. RUMOUR, used on the transfer desk only, means a link and not a move, however loudly it is being talked about. We do not blur the three to make a story sound bigger than it is. When we are not sure, the label says so.
How the daily desks are made
The daily desk entries and the question pages are drafted with automated writing tools, language models among them, working from the sources each entry names. Every draft goes through the same checks before it can publish: a named source for each fact, figures re-read against those sources at the moment of publishing, and a dated stamp. A draft that fails them does not run. No person reads a desk entry before it goes up, so those pages carry The ARCHV Desk as their byline rather than a name. Joseph Bankole sets these rules and answers for what the desks publish, and a piece he wrote himself carries his name.
Corrections are added, not hidden
The archive is a record, so we do not quietly rewrite it. When something changes, or we get something wrong, we add a dated note to the entry ("Update, 4 July: ...") instead of editing the original out of existence. You can still read what we first said and see what changed.
The artwork is our own
Every image on The ARCHV is original illustration, drawn in our own house style. We use no club crests, no kit designs, no federation or competition marks, and no photographs. The faces are stylised drawings published as editorial commentary, not likenesses passed off as photos.
We answer to nobody in the game
The ARCHV is independent. We are not affiliated with FIFA, or with any club, federation, league or competition. No governing body approves our copy and none pays for it. That independence is the point of the whole thing: it is what lets us call a rumour a rumour, and correct ourselves in public when we get it wrong.