The News of the World & The People do make up transfer lies

Having run 101 Great Goals for almost three years now, it is quite rare to come across a useful football website that appears to be somewhat unknown.

Previously, we have lamented the loss of Setanta and their excellent live transfer blog page and although Sky Sports do have a decent similar offering, a site that is very useful during the summer transfer window is Football Transfer League, listing all the latest transfer rumours.

For a long time now we have questioned whether the papers, especially the tabloids, do make up transfer rumours in order to sell their copy or to grab some more hits on their websites. Football Transfer League address this exact question by ranking which papers are the most accurate and how many rumours are produced by each source in England and Scotland. (See here.)

It will come as no surprise that The News of the World have a pretty lamentable accuracy percentage of 12.51% whilst The People are only a marginal improvement on 13.09%. The fact that the two Sunday tabloids average the most amount of rumours (NOTW: 7.01, The People: 3.69) should give you something to chew on when you read their transfer lies whilst tucking into the Sunday roast.

Another points of interest from these statistics is the low ranking achieved by The Daily Mirror, a newspaper that is swiftly gaining a reputation for made-up rumours. Especially as The Mirror are reportedly set to launch a new stand alone football site. Interestingly, The Mirror’s accuracy rating of 18.46% is only slightly bettered by the lowest broadsheet in the rankings, the Daily Telegraph, on 18.9%.

Credit must also be given to The Daily Record (30.39%), The Guardian (29.03%) and The Independent (25.73%) for their relatively high scores in paper rumour accuracy. It must be pointed out though that if these newspapers had a similar accuracy rating on any other subject, be it news or sport, they would quickly be denounced as unreliable.

Remember Football Transfer League and their statistics next time you scan those transfer gossip pages every morning.