The three kinds of claim we make

Verification looks different depending on what is being claimed, so we treat three categories separately.

1. Claims about our own games

Timing windows, scoring formulas, difficulty ramps, reach distances. These are verified directly against the game's source code, which is published to your browser and can be inspected. This is the great majority of what we write, and it is the category where we can be exact.

2. Claims about technology

How the canvas element works, what local storage does, how frame timing behaves. These are verified against primary documentation — the specification or the vendor's own reference — and cited on the page.

3. Claims about football itself

Rules, terminology, how a real technique works. These are checked against the Laws of the Game or an equivalent authoritative source, and we keep them general. We do not report on live football, results, transfers or player form, because we are not a news site and could not verify it properly.

How we verify a gameplay number

Every number that appears in a guide goes through the same check:

  1. The value is read from the game's code, not estimated from playing.
  2. It is confirmed by playing the game and observing the described behaviour.
  3. It is written into the game page's scoring table as well as the guide, so the two cannot drift apart.
  4. When the game changes, both are updated together, and the last-updated date moves.

This is why our guides quote figures like "a 0.32 second reload" rather than "a short cooldown". If we cannot state a number precisely, we describe the behaviour instead and say that it is approximate.

How we choose sources

In order of preference:

  • Primary and normative. A specification, official documentation, or the governing body's own text.
  • Primary and observable. The game's own code and behaviour, which anyone can check.
  • Reputable secondary. Well-maintained technical references, used for explanation rather than for facts.

We avoid content farms, scraped sites, undated pages and anything that cites no source of its own. We do not cite other gaming blogs for factual claims, and we never cite a page just to have a citation.

How we handle uncertainty

Some things genuinely cannot be stated precisely, and we would rather say so than round a guess up into a fact. Three examples of how we phrase it:

  • Reaction times. Simple visual reaction time is commonly described as falling in the region of 200–300 milliseconds, but a browser test also measures your display, your browser and your input device. So we present our reaction test as a relative score against your own baseline, not as a measurement of you.
  • Transfer to real football. We say that arcade games train decisions, timing and pattern recognition, and that they do not train technique. We do not claim a measured improvement in real play, because we have not measured one.
  • "Best" and "most popular". When we rank games, we say what we are ranking them on. Our popularity indicator reflects our own editorial judgement of how much play a game gets on this site, not an audited figure, and we label it as such.

Updating outdated information

Three triggers cause a page to be revisited:

  • A game changed. The affected guide is updated the same day, because its numbers are now wrong.
  • A reader told us. Reports are checked against the game before anything is changed.
  • The review cycle came round. Pages are re-read on a rolling basis, highest traffic first.

If a page is still accurate, we leave the last-updated date alone. Refreshing a date without changing anything is a way of misleading readers about how current a page is, and we do not do it.

Corrections process

  1. Report. Anyone can report an error by email or through the contact form. Tell us the page and the claim.
  2. Check. We verify the claim against the game or the source. This usually takes a day or two.
  3. Fix. The page is corrected, along with any other page carrying the same error.
  4. Disclose. A substantive correction gets a dated note at the foot of the page saying what was wrong and what changed. We do not silently rewrite a claim that readers may have acted on.
  5. Reply. If you reported it and left an address, we tell you what we did.

Typographical fixes, broken-link repairs and clarifications that do not change meaning are made without a correction note.

What we will not do

  • Invent a statistic, a percentage or a survey result.
  • Attribute a quote to anyone, real or invented.
  • Claim credentials, qualifications or awards that do not exist.
  • Present a guess as a measurement.
  • Report live football news, results or transfers.