Editorial policy

This page is our editorial standards in one place — what we cover, how we source it, how AI is used in the drafting, how we handle corrections and complaints, and how to get in touch.

What we do, and how

Flagside.football is a fast, English-language football news outlet. We cover European football — the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, the Champions League and the Europa League — alongside the lanes that make football culture: viral moments, transfer drama, kit leaks, wonderkids, fan reactions, matchday chaos.
Every article on the site is grounded in publicly available reporting from a curated set of football sources. We watch, we cluster, we summarize, we publish in our own voice. We don't syndicate other outlets' work; we tell the same story differently and credit the people who reported it first.

Editorial independence

The newsroom operates independently of any commercial interest. We do not take operator money, run affiliate links, accept paid placements, or surface any betting CTAs anywhere on the site. Our reviews of clubs, players, kits, transfers, and managers are not influenced by any advertiser, sponsor, sportsbook, or club press office.
No external party — including any company that might one day buy advertising on the site — has a veto over what we publish, when we publish it, or how we frame it. Editorial decisions sit with the newsroom.

Sourcing standards

Every article cites the upstream reporting it builds on. The full source list is printed at the foot of each article alongside the clubs, players, and topics covered.
Where a fact is reported by a single source we say so, and we use language that reflects the level of confidence available — "according to", "reportedly", "understands", "is said to". When we describe a transfer story, we attach a reliability label (official, advanced talks, strong rumor, early interest, social-only) so readers can calibrate the certainty of what they're reading.
We do not invent quotes. We do not invent fees, scorelines, ages, or contract lengths. If a fact is not in any source we have read, it does not go in the article.
Tier-one sources for us are BBC Sport, Sky Sports, The Guardian, ESPN FC, The Athletic, Reuters Sport, AP Sports, official club channels, and the major league press operations. Tier-two sources include trusted football specialists like Football Italia, Football España, Foot Mercato, Football Oranje, Sportbible Football, Footy Headlines, and Fabrizio Romano's public reporting. Each source is reviewed before it is enabled, and rate-limited so we don't put unreasonable load on anyone's servers.

AI-assisted reporting — full disclosure

Articles on Flagside are drafted with the assistance of large language models working from briefs derived from publicly available source reporting. We disclose this openly because we think you have a right to know.
The pipeline runs four stages before anything is published: discovery (we crawl enabled sources for new stories), clustering (we group source items that cover the same underlying story), drafting (an editor model writes a draft from the cluster's combined facts and the source headlines), and senior review (a separate model checks the draft for factual coherence, attribution, plagiarism risk, and a list of safety flags). Articles that fail the automated checks are held back for a human editor to approve, edit, or reject.
AI is the writing assistant; the responsibility for what is published rests with us. Every fact in our articles is grounded in identifiable upstream reporting that is cited at the foot of the article. We do not use AI to generate facts, fabricate quotes, or "research" stories without source material.
We do not use AI to imitate the style of named individual journalists, to fabricate images of real people, or to generate audio of real people's voices. Cover images are either branded SVGs we generate ourselves or photographs hot-linked from the source under their license.

Corrections policy

When we get something wrong, we say so.
How to flag a correction: email corrections@flagside.football with the article URL, the part you believe is wrong, and any source that supports the correction. We aim to respond to credible correction requests within 48 hours.
How we publish corrections: minor typographical fixes are applied silently. Material factual corrections — anything that changes the meaning of the article — are made in-line, and a correction note is added at the bottom of the article describing what was changed and when. We don't quietly retitle or rewrite articles after publication without a visible note.
Major errors that go to the heart of an article will be acknowledged with a stand-alone correction or, in the most serious cases, a retraction. The original article URL will continue to work but will display the retraction and reason.

Right of reply

If you are named in an article and believe you have been treated unfairly, contact corrections@flagside.football. We will consider any reasonable response, factual clarification, or denial, and will publish it where we judge it fair to do so. Public figures and institutions can expect us to apply ordinary news-reporting standards; we will not hold an article back from publication simply because the subject would prefer we didn't run it.

Plagiarism and attribution

We rewrite stories in our own voice. Our automated review pass scans every draft for verbatim overlap with its source material. The senior-editor model is instructed to bounce any draft that re-uses an upstream sentence of more than ~8 words verbatim. Where a quotation is used, it is enclosed in quotation marks and attributed to the original speaker and the outlet that first published it.
We share the topic of a story with our sources; we don't share their words.

Image rights

Where we display a photograph of a real event we either: (a) generate an abstract branded SVG ourselves; (b) hot-link the og:image of the source article we're building on, with attribution; or (c) embed an image from Wikimedia Commons under a CC reuse license with attribution carried in the asset's usage-rights metadata. We do not reproduce paywalled or contractually-restricted photography.
If you are a rights-holder and believe one of our images infringes your rights, contact corrections@flagside.football and we will remove or replace it on request.

What we won't cover

No betting tips, odds, or operator content. Flagside is editorial-only.
No coverage of minors (under-18s) that involves allegations, scandal, medical detail, or relationships beyond what is plainly part of the football story (under-17 internationals, academy debuts, etc.).
No reproduction of leaked private communications, photographs, or videos of named individuals without a clear public interest test.
No coverage of fan violence in a way that glorifies it.
No content that targets, harasses, or stereotypes a group of people on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, or nationality.

Help with gambling problems

Football and gambling are tangled up in the public conversation, even though we don't cover betting ourselves. If gambling is a concern for you or someone close to you, free and confidential help is available:
BeGambleAware (UK): begambleaware.org — free, confidential, 0808 8020 133.
Gambling Therapy (international): gamblingtherapy.org — free online support, multi-language.
NCPG (US): ncpgambling.org — 1-800-GAMBLER.

Contact

Corrections, complaints, right-of-reply: corrections@flagside.football.
Privacy: privacy@flagside.football.
Legal / commercial: legal@flagside.football.
Tips: news@flagside.football. We treat tips as confidential by default.