About — who we are and how the scores work

A newsroom that never sleeps, a confidence score on every rumour, and a small run of goods. Written from Birmingham, not from a content farm.

Who we are

Up The Villa is an independent Aston Villa publication run by supporters in Birmingham. It is not a club channel, not a betting affiliate and not a network site. There is one editorial voice, and it lives at the B6 end of the city.

The site has three parts. A newsroom that watches named sources around the clock and turns what they report into short, honest summaries with a timeline. A transfer board that treats every rumour as a claim to be scored, not a headline to be repeated. And a small line of goods, designed here and printed to order, that pays for the hosting.

How the newsroom works

Every hour we check the public feeds of a fixed list of outlets: the club, national broadcasters and papers, the local press, and the transfer specialists. When a report is about Villa, it joins the story we already have on that same piece of news, so one piece of news has one page, and that page is updated as new reports arrive.

The newsroom is automated, and we say so. Its articles are written by an AI model working only from what those outlets have published, in its own words, and they are credited to the Up The Villa Newsroom, never to a made-up person. Before a story goes live, automatic checks reject copied wording, quotes that do not appear in the reports, rumours written up as fact, and stories that are not really about Villa. Every story ends with the outlets that reported it, each linked to its original article, and when it was first reported and last updated. Features and culture pieces are written by people and carry their names.

A story is marked DEVELOPING while new reports are still arriving, and carries an UPDATED N MIN AGO stamp so you can see how fresh it is. It becomes CONFIRMED when a reliable source confirms it and OFFICIAL when the club or the competition says so. A story can also be DEBUNKED.

Confidence — how it is estimated

Every story and every transfer link carries a confidence percentage. It is an estimate made by Up The Villa, not a fact, and it is shown as a band as much as a number:

90–100 — OFFICIAL / CONFIRMED. The club, the competition or a reliable primary source has said it.
75–89 — VERY STRONG. Independent reliable outlets, reporting separately, agree.
55–74 — PLAUSIBLE. A credible outlet is reporting it as its own information.
30–54 — RUMOUR. Reported, but by outlets that trade in rumour, or by one outlet only.
0–29 — VERY SPECULATIVE. Aggregators, “multiple reports” that trace back to one origin, or nothing checkable at all.

The score rises with the reliability of the outlets involved, with the number of independent origins (see sources policy), with official statements, and with time as a story is repeated by outlets that do their own reporting. It falls when the only reports are circular, when a fee or a name appears at the second link in a chain rather than the first, and when a reliable outlet contradicts the claim.

On the page it looks like this — a bar on a track, and the percentage in caps:

Confidence64%?

Madness — how it is estimated

The madness score, 00.0 to 10.0, measures how far a story has run from its evidence. It is not a measure of how likely the thing is; it is a measure of how wild the claim has become relative to what anyone actually reported.

It goes up with big round fees that appear in later reports but not in the first; with the number of outlets repeating a single origin; with quotation marks doing heavy lifting (“ready to bid”, “admired by”); and with a gap between the size of the claim and the confidence score. A British record bid sourced to an aggregator quoting a blog scores high. An official signing scores near zero, however large the fee.

Stories with a madness score of five or more show the meter on their page. The highest of the week takes the Madness slot on the front page. Nothing on that slot is presented as true; it is presented as mad.

Sources policy

We name every source and link to its original article. The newsroom reads a report’s public page for its facts and writes its own article; it never republishes an outlet’s text. Outlets whose terms do not allow AI use are linked to and credited, but their words are never given to the model. Where an outlet is only repeating another outlet, the confidence score counts them as one.

The corroboration count on a story is the number of distinct origins, not the number of outlets. If four outlets all trace back to one Italian blog, the count is one. This is deliberate and it is the single most useful number on the site.

Outlets are weighted by a reliability score we maintain by hand and adjust when they are right or wrong. Paywalled outlets are linked to, not summarised beyond their public headline. We do not scrape social media accounts. If you run an outlet and want your feed removed from our watch list, write to us and it will be.

Independence

Up The Villa is an independent supporter publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Aston Villa Football Club, the Premier League or any of their partners. Reporting is summarised from named sources and linked to them; rumours are labelled as rumours.

We do not use the club crest, the lion, official kit photography or licensed player imagery. Our colours are near the club’s but not the club’s. Full statement on the independence page.

Contact

Corrections, takedown requests, and anything about a source: see the contact page. We answer corrections first.