There is a green tick on this site, and it reads Confirmed by BBC Sport — or whichever outlet it was. It is the single most misreadable thing here, so it's worth being exact about what it claims.
Confirmed means: an established outlet later reported the same story. BBC Sport, Sky Sports News or ESPN FC published it too.
Confirmed does not mean the transfer happened.
A player can be genuinely, accurately reported as moving to a club, with talks genuinely under way and a fee genuinely agreed, and then not move. The manager changes his mind. Another club gatecrashes. The medical throws something up. A director of football gets sacked on the Tuesday and the whole plan dies with him.
None of that makes the reporting wrong. The journalist who told you Arsenal were in advanced talks was correct: Arsenal were in advanced talks. Judging them on whether the deal ultimately completed would mean marking them down for events they described accurately and had no hand in.
The useful question for a reader is simple: when this person tells me something is happening, is it actually happening, or have they seen a rumour and run with it?
That's what an outlet picking the story up tests. Those organisations have editors, standards and something to lose by publishing a fabrication. When they run the same story, it's evidence that the thing being described was real rather than invented or wildly premature.
Nothing more than that, but nothing less either — and it's a considerably harder bar than the one most transfer accounts are held to, which is none.
This is the honest limitation, and it's better stated plainly than discovered later.
Confirmation works at the level of the story, not the individual claim. If a journalist reports that a club has submitted a £70m bid, and an outlet later reports that the same club has made an offer for the same player, that counts as confirmation — even if the outlet says the offer was £55m.
So the confirmation rate reads as "the stories they break turn out to be real", not "their numbers are accurate". A reporter who is consistently right about the move and consistently out on the fee will not currently be caught by this. Measuring that would need a different mechanism, and a much harder one to build fairly, since outlets frequently disagree with each other about fees too.
Every tick is checkable. Each confirmed story on ITK names the outlet that reported it, shows how long after the original scoop it landed, quotes their post, and links both to their written report and to the post itself. If a confirmation looks wrong to you, you can see the evidence for it in two clicks — and if it is wrong, that's an AI mis-match rather than a judgement about the journalist, and we'd like to know.
Just as importantly: an unconfirmed story is not a black mark. It usually means the story is simply new. Being first is the whole point of an insider, and being first necessarily means standing alone for a while.
Stories sit as Awaiting independent reporting until an outlet catches up, which for a genuine scoop might be minutes or might be days. It only starts to say something when a journalist accumulates a long tail of stories that nobody else ever picks up — and that pattern is exactly what the confirmation percentage is designed to surface.
The separate Reported move later ended status is the one that reflects badly, and it is applied when a story falls through rather than when it's merely waiting.
🤖 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.