Reliability guide
The tier list every score on this site is built from, taken from the r/Gunners transfer reliability guide. A report's weight is its tier weight multiplied by how strong the claim is, how recent it is, and whether the source is saying it first or repeating someone else.
Only tiers 0–3 are ingested at all. Tier 4 and unranked sites are not scored low — they are refused outright, because filtering them after the fact still meant fabricated stories reached the ticker.
| Tier | Weight | Sources |
|---|---|---|
| Official | ×1.00 | Arsenal.com, u/arsenal |
| Tier 1 | ×0.92 | David Ornstein, BBC Sport, Sami Mokbel, James McNicholas (Gunnerblog), The Athletic |
| Tier 2 | ×0.78 | Charles Watts, Amy Lawrence, Fabrizio Romano excluded, The Guardian, HoA |
| Tier 3 | ×0.55 | Gary Jacob, Gianluca Di Marzio, James Olley, Alexis Bernard, Mark Irwin, Sam Dean, Simon Collings, Manu Lonjon, Jeremy Wilson, Guillem Balague, James Benge, Andy Burton, Kaya Kaynak, Florian Plettenberg, Raphael Honigstein, Mark Ogden, Ben Jacobs, John Cross, Alex Crook, Tom Canton, Chris Wheatley, TNAT, Sky Sports, The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph, Bild, L'Equipe, Kicker |
| Tier 4 | ×0.30 | Kaveh Solhekol, Kike Marin, Nicolo Schira, Daily Mail, Goal, Marca, JOE.co.uk, Daily Express, The Mirror, Cadena Ser, Mundo Deportivo, BBC Gossip, Bleacher Report, AS, Metro, SportBild, football.london, Caught Offside, HITC, 90Min, Sport, El Confidencial |
| Unranked | ×0.12 | Anything not on the list. It still registers, but barely. |
Likelihood is the headline number: the chance the move actually happens. Every report adds evidence in log-odds, so corroboration compounds the way evidence should — two tier-3 reports beat one, but nowhere near double, and neither gets close to a single tier-1 “fee agreed”.
Sourcing is a separate number: how good the reporting behind the story is, from the best tier that has touched it and how many independent voices there are. A story can be likely and badly sourced, or well sourced and going nowhere — Tier 1 saying a player is not coming is both credible and a low likelihood.
Attribution is the hard part. A claim is credited to whoever actually made it, not to whoever printed it — but that only works if the outlet can be trusted to report it honestly. A ranked outlet may pass its credit up to a named source; an unranked one may not, because “FABRIZIO ROMANO CONFIRMS” in a headline is not the same as Fabrizio Romano saying anything. A journalist's own byline always counts, whoever published it.
Four things pull a report's weight down:
- Repetition. One outlet running the same story six days in a row counts barely more than running it once.
- Relaying. If an outlet is reporting what someone else said, the claim is credited to whoever said it first — twenty sites quoting one Ornstein post is one source, not twenty.
- Age. Reports halve in weight every twelve days.
- Denials. A newer denial from an equally good source flips the status and pulls the score down hard.
Only Arsenal themselves can mark a deal Signed. An outlet writing “completes move” gets the story to Imminent, no further.