Every transfer reporter has a good record, if you ask them. The trouble is that nobody has ever kept score. Claims are made in public, on timestamped posts, in front of millions of people — and then they scroll away, and the ones that were wrong are quietly forgotten while the ones that were right get screenshotted forever.
ITK keeps the receipts. It watches a set of the best-known transfer journalists on X, records every post the moment it appears, works out which underlying story each post belongs to, and then measures two things: who got there first, and whether what they said turned out to be real.
This is the foundation, and getting it wrong would break everything else. A topic on ITK is one real-world story, not one post. "Bruno Guimarães to Arsenal" is a single topic that covers the whole saga — the first sniff of interest, the opening bid, the rejected bid, personal terms, the medical, the announcement. Twenty posts across three weeks about that move are twenty posts about one story.
It isn't only transfers. A manager walking out, a contract being signed, a governance row at FIFA — all of it counts, because breaking real news is the skill being measured, not the subject matter.
For each story, whoever posted about it earliest among the tracked journalists is first across the line. Speed is then a simple ratio: of the new stories you covered in the chosen period, what share did you break first?
Deliberately, only the first post on a story wins that race. Following someone else's scoop an hour later earns nothing, however well phrased. And because Speed is a percentage rather than a count, a reporter who covers eight stories and breaks six of them beats one who covers ninety and breaks nine.
Being fast is easy if you're willing to be wrong. So Speed on its own would reward exactly the behaviour readers complain about — the account that fires off every whisper it hears and lets the hit rate look after itself.
The confirmation rate is the counterweight. Of the stories you broke first, how many were later reported by an established outlet — BBC Sport, Sky Sports News or ESPN FC? Those organisations carry real reputational risk for publishing something false, which is what makes them a useful referee. If they run the story too, it was a real story.
Two rules keep that check honest. An outlet cannot confirm a story broken by its own journalist, because a newsroom publishing its own reporter's work is not independent verification. And a daily gossip column or paper-talk round-up cannot confirm anything at all, because those columns are assembled from the very reporters being ranked — letting one count would mean a scoop verifying itself.
Worth being precise about what confirmation does and doesn't say: it means the story was real, not that the transfer completed. A widely reported move can still collapse, and that is not a mark against the person who correctly reported it was happening.
The final score is Speed × 40% + confirmation rate × 60%.
The tilt is intentional. Anyone can be quick. Being quick and right is the rarer thing, and it is what a reader actually wants when they see a name they recognise appear in their timeline. A reporter who posts infrequently but is right almost every time should finish above a reporter who posts constantly and is right some of the time — and under this weighting, they do.
Speed and the confirmation rate are both averages, and averages are meaningless on tiny samples. Break one story, have it confirmed, and you'd have a flawless 100% record from a single data point.
So a journalist needs to have been in at least three races in the selected period to hold a full ranking. Below that they're marked provisional with an asterisk, shown dimmed, and placed below every qualified journalist regardless of their percentages. Choose a shorter period and you'll see more asterisks — that's the threshold working, not a fault.
Level on score, the first tiebreaker is the proportion of posts later deleted — lower is better. The second is average posts per story — again, lower is better. Think of it as goal difference, but for noise. Two journalists with identical accuracy are separated by which of them said it more cleanly.
The table is banded like a domestic league. First place is The GOAT. Second to fourth are Elite. Fifth to eighth are Highly Reliable. The bottom three sit in Wait for Confirmation — not an accusation of dishonesty, but a signal that when that name appears in your timeline, the historical record suggests waiting for someone else to pick it up.
Every post is archived the moment it's seen. If it's later deleted from X, it stays in ITK's archive and stays scored — clearly marked as deleted, never presented as though it still stands.
This matters more than it might sound. A leaderboard that forgets deleted claims can be gamed in about ten seconds: post everything, delete the misses, keep a spotless record. The archive is what makes the score mean anything.
These rankings concern real, named professionals, and the grouping of posts into stories is done by an AI system that can get things wrong. Any journalist listed here who believes a score, a story match or a confirmation is incorrect can write to picketalert@gmail.com and it will be looked at properly. Every confirmation on the site names its source and links to the post behind it, so the evidence for any individual judgement can be checked directly.
🤖 Automatically classified. Everything described here is applied by software, and software gets things wrong. The scores measure this published methodology — not a reporter's honesty, competence or professional standing. Anything on the site can be challenged, and disputed items are suppressed while they are checked. ITK is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to BBC Sport, Sky Sports News, ESPN FC or X.