How we research a football club's history.

A claim is not a fact until it has a source

The failure mode in club history is almost never "no answer". It is a confident answer with a plausible date or minute in it. Our rule is that a fact without a source is a guess wearing a date. Every claim we plan to use in a game, timeline or archive is recorded with its date, the competition it belongs to, where it was found, what kind of source it is and how confident we are in it.

Four kinds of source, in order of weight

1. Primary witness and the people who were there. Fans, former players and club insiders hold knowledge that never made it into print — songs, rituals, who was loved and why. Their testimony is valuable and is recorded as testimony.
2. Community knowledge bases. Fan-maintained wikis and databases are the quickest way to build a season or squad picture. They are structured and detailed, but contributors vary in rigour.
3. Governing bodies. Football associations and league administrations publish fixtures, results and cup records. On results and dates these override everything else.
4. Contemporary press and archive footage. Excellent for atmosphere, quotes and context; weakest for exact minutes and scorelines, because match reports were written quickly.

Four confidence levels

• Verified — two independent sources agree, or one governing body states it.
• Reported — a single credible source states it.
• Contested — credible sources disagree. We keep both versions and a note explaining the conflict.
• Unsourced — we do not publish it.

The last category matters most. It is tempting to fill a gap with something that "sounds right", but a historical product that includes one invented detail loses the trust of every supporter who knows better.

Normalise before you compare

Different sources present the same information in different ways, and comparing raw numbers causes errors. Some sports publications print the winner first rather than the home side first. Match reports sometimes write a score from the perspective of the club the author supports. A minute reported as 85 in one place and 86 in another is a conflict to record, not an average to take.

So we normalise every record into one convention — home side first, away side second, with the competition and date in a fixed format — and decide direction from the report's own wording rather than from the digits.

Keep testimony and match records apart

Oral accounts are priceless for culture and terrible for precision. A fan can describe exactly what the stadium felt like when a goal went in and be off by a year or a minute on when it happened. We file both kinds of evidence separately and never let a memory supply a scoreline. The testimony enriches the story; the record anchors it.

Different sports are different histories

Many clubs run football and basketball (and other sections) under the same name and crest. They have separate seasons, results and honours. Citing a basketball season page to answer a football question is one of the commonest mistakes in club-history writing, so each of our archives is built per sport.

Real people, public context, corrections

Real owners, officials and players appear only in public, dated contexts. Anything still argued over is marked as open history rather than settled. A player who left for the rival is a real part of the story and is written as history, not as abuse.

When we get something wrong, we want to hear it. Corrections can be sent through the contact page, and our editorial standards explain how they are handled.