Editorial standards

These are the rules we hold ourselves to. They exist so a reader can tell where a fact on this site came from and how far to trust it.

We report from primary sources: what someone said at a press conference or in an interview, official club, league and federation announcements, official squad and transaction lists, and official match data. Where we rely on another outlet’s account, we say so.

A quotation on this site is what the person said, word for word. We do not alter a word or a punctuation mark inside quotation marks, and we do not tidy up grammar. We say where and when the person was speaking, not merely where we read it. A translated answer is identified as translated.

We do not publish another organisation’s exclusive. If a fact was broken by one reporter, it is their work, and we do not republish it, reword it, or turn it into reported speech to disguise where it came from.

We do not publish anything we cannot verify. A claim resting on a single unverifiable source comes out rather than being hedged.

Private matters that are not the story stay out. Health, bereavement, crime affecting someone’s family and legal proceedings are included only when they are the news itself, or when the person or their family has chosen to make them public, and then in their framing.

Statistics come from official competition data. Where sources disagree, we follow the organiser’s own record or leave the detail out.

Videos on our articles are published on the Utopia Sports YouTube channel and embedded here. Match highlights on our scores and match pages come from the channel of the competition, club or broadcaster that owns them. We write our own summary of what is in a video.

We take no payment for editorial coverage. If that ever changes, any paid or sponsored item will be labelled as such at the top of the page.

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