Football sites: coverage, data and the betting problem

Football has more coverage than any other sport on the web and the widest quality range within it. The categories are the familiar ones: live scores, news and transfer coverage, statistics and analysis, and club-specific sites.

Transfer coverage deserves particular scepticism. It is the highest-traffic and lowest-accuracy part of football media, built on a mixture of genuine reporting, agent briefing and outright speculation, and the three are rarely distinguished on the page. A site that names its source, or is honest that it is aggregating someone else's claim, is being more useful than one that reports a rumour as news.

Statistics and analysis sites have improved enormously as event-level data has become available, and this is where the most interesting football writing now happens. The thing to check is which data provider a site uses and whether it explains its metrics, because the same-named statistic is calculated differently by different providers.

Gambling money funds a large share of football content, and it shapes what gets written and how. Sites that disclose the relationship are easier to read critically than sites that present the same material as neutral analysis.