The Matchday Almanac is an independent reference on how football and basketball results are produced, recorded and interpreted. It exists because the numbers that surround sport are treated as self-explanatory and almost never are.
What we publish
Explanatory guides, written to be durable rather than topical. The material covers how a live score is assembled and why it changes, how competition formats determine what a result is worth, how fixture calendars are constructed, and what each statistic in a standard panel was actually defined to measure. It is written for the reader who has followed sport for years and has never had the machinery explained.
What we deliberately do not publish
This is the more important half of the description.
- No live scores, feeds or data services. Every page here is static. We do not operate a scoring service, we do not distribute a feed, and there is no widget or API to embed.
- No odds, betting tips, predictions or tipster content of any kind, and no affiliate relationships with anyone who provides them.
- No transfer speculation or breaking news. We explain how such reporting works; we do not produce it.
Independence
The Matchday Almanac is an independent editorial resource. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to any live score service, sports data provider, governing body, league, club, broadcaster or betting operator, and it is not a source of live scores, real-time sports data or betting services. Where third parties are named on this site, they are named as sources or as points of comparison only, and no relationship is implied.
This statement is not decorative. It is the governing description of what this site is, it applies to every page, and it stands whatever else changes here.
How we source material
Where a rule is at issue we cite the governing document rather than paraphrasing it — for the football material, that is the published Laws of the Game and their annual amendments. Where a claim is quantitative we prefer primary statistical sources and peer-reviewed or openly published research over secondary summaries. Where something is genuinely uncertain or contested, we say so rather than picking a side for the sake of a cleaner sentence.
Corrections
Anything here may be wrong, and definitions in particular move over time as competitions amend their rules. When we find an error we correct the page rather than leaving it and appending a note, except where the error would have changed a reader's conclusion, in which case the change is stated on the page itself.
Who this is for
The material assumes you already follow sport and are not looking for an introduction to the rules. It is written for the reader who has watched a thousand matches and has never seen anyone explain where the number on the screen comes from, why two sites disagree about possession, or why a competition's tie-breaking order can matter more than a month of results.
It is also written to be useful to people building things: anyone displaying scores, embedding a widget, or working with sports data will find the sections on how events are recorded and how definitions diverge between providers more practically relevant than the general reader will.
Editorial approach
Three commitments shape how these pages are written.
- Definitions before conclusions. Where a term has more than one common definition, the definitions come first and the argument comes after. Most sports disagreements are definitional and dissolve once this is done.
- Durability over topicality. Nothing here is pegged to a current season, a current squad or a current table. A page written this year should be equally correct in five years, and where a rule is likely to change we say so rather than writing as though it will not.
- Uncertainty stated plainly. Where the honest answer is that a measure is weak, contested or provider-dependent, we say that instead of presenting a confident number.
Contact
This is a reference site rather than a service, and it does not operate a contact desk, a subscription, an account system or a commercial enquiries process. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to buy.
Start with the library for the full index, or with how live football scores are produced if you would rather begin at the beginning.