Imagine a transfer leaderboard where each post counts as an entry. Post that Arsenal want a striker, and you've entered. Post it again with a different emoji, enter again. Name six clubs for one player and you've covered every outcome, so whichever one happens, you called it.
That's a raffle. Buy enough tickets and you cannot lose — and the account that buys the most tickets ends up looking like the best-informed person in football, when all they've demonstrated is stamina.
Any scoring system built on post counts collapses into that. So ITK isn't built on post counts.
Every post is grouped into the underlying real-world story it belongs to. All the phases of one transfer — interest, talks, a rejected bid, personal terms, the medical, the announcement — are a single story, not six.
The effect is immediate. Posting about the same saga fifteen times gives you exactly the same standing as posting about it once: you were either first on that story or you weren't. The fifteenth post earns precisely nothing that the first didn't already earn.
Journalists don't only break stories. They watch matches and react, they argue about team selection, they post about the weather at a World Cup, they reply to people. A reporter can produce fifty posts on a Saturday afternoon without a single one containing new information.
ITK judges each post on whether it reports an actual development — a move, a contract, a managerial change, an injury ruling someone out, club or governance news. Match commentary, opinion, previews, reaction and banter are still archived and still appear on that journalist's own page, because they are part of what they do. They just don't open a story and can't win a race.
Without that rule, whoever live-tweets the most goals climbs a transfer leaderboard, which would be absurd.
Speed is the share of stories you covered that you broke first. The confirmation rate is the share of stories you broke first that an outlet later reported. Neither is a running total, so neither can be inflated by doing more of anything.
A reporter who covered eight stories and was first on six has a Speed of 75%. One who covered ninety and was first on nine has 10%. The second person has more scoops in absolute terms and a far worse strike rate — and it's the strike rate that tells you what to expect the next time their name appears in your timeline.
When two journalists finish level on score, the first tiebreaker is the proportion of their posts later deleted, and the second is their average number of posts per story. Lower wins on both.
That second one is doing quiet work. It says that if two people are equally fast and equally accurate, the one who said it in two posts rather than eleven ranks higher. Restraint is treated as a quality of the reporting, not a missed opportunity.
And you can't delete your way to a good record. Every post is archived the moment it's seen. Delete it from X afterwards and it stays here, marked as deleted and still counted.
Otherwise the strategy would be obvious: post everything, quietly remove the misses, keep a perfect record. The archive is what stops the whole thing being trivially gameable.
A table where a reporter who posts twice a week can finish above one who posts thirty times a day — and where the volume column exists to be looked at alongside the score rather than celebrated on its own.
That isn't a criticism of high-output accounts. Some of them are fast, well-sourced and right, and they'll rank accordingly. The point is that being prolific earns nothing by itself. It has to come with being first, and being first has to come with being right.
🤖 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.