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Who runs this
A two-person operation, with one job each
Lead writer · kit-of-the-day · voice
Jake, 16
Jake writes the kit takes, the team-by-team tournament previews and most of the editorial blog posts. He's a 16-year-old kit-collector based in the UK who got properly into shirt design through Classic Football Shirts and the back catalogue of David Moor's Historicalkits.co.uk. His voice is the one you hear on the site — opinionated, fast, kit-first. That's the feature, not the bug.
Jake doesn't handle commercial decisions, contracts, or financial advice — he writes about the kits. Anything that touches money, sizing/care advice or buyer-protection guidance is signed off by the editor below.
Editor · operator · sourcing & sign-off
Toc (Tauseef Azim)
Toc owns and operates Footy Kits Battle. Adult, parent, long-time kit follower. Reviews and signs off on every commerce-adjacent post — buying guides, sizing advice, retro-kit authentication tips, anything where a reader is being recommended to spend money. Builds the tools (Kit Clash, Football Wordle, predictor), commissions the editorial calendar with Jake, and handles the affiliate, technical and legal side of the site.
Reachable on the contact page. All correspondence with brands, retailers or partners goes through this address — Jake doesn't represent the site commercially.
How the kit ranking works
The Kit Clash leaderboard at /leaderboard/ is generated entirely from real fan votes. We don't hand-rank kits and we don't weight votes from any single source. The mechanism is the same Elo rating system used to rank chess players.
- Default starting rating: every kit starts at 1500 Elo, the standard chess starting point.
- K-factor: 32. A win against an equally-ranked kit adds ~16 points; a win against a higher-ranked kit adds more, and against a lower-ranked kit, less.
- No ties. Every Kit Clash round is binary — A or B — so the maths stays clean.
- Atomicity: votes are written inside a Postgres transaction (when the global backend is enabled), so two people voting at the same moment can never lose either vote. The migration that defines this is in our public repo at
supabase/migrations.sql. - No vote-stuffing protection beyond rate limits. We're honest about this — the site assumes good faith. If we ever detect coordinated brigading we'll flag and recompute, but the leaderboard is not certified-tournament-grade data, it's a community signal.
- Update cadence: ratings update in real time on every vote. The leaderboard reflects votes cast up to the second the page loaded.
Where the kit photos come from
Every kit photo on the site is sourced from the manufacturer's official press release or an authorised retailer where the press release isn't directly downloadable. We track the source URL for every photo in a public manifest at /kits/manifest.json — anyone can audit our provenance.
When we crop, recolour or composite an image (for example to remove a leak-site watermark before we've been able to re-source from the official press release), we say so explicitly in the manifestnote field. We won't silently process images and pretend they came from somewhere they didn't.
Editorial photo additions are OCR-checked for hidden site watermarks before they go live — a quarterly tesseract sweep across public/kits/*.jpg catches any leak-site logos we might have missed at upload.
Editorial process
Every piece of content on the site goes through this lane:
- Brief. Toc and Jake agree an angle and a target query (e.g. “World Cup 2026 dark horses, ranked” or “Brazil 2026 home kit review”).
- Draft. Jake writes the voice, the kit takes, the verdicts.
- Edit. Toc reviews for factual accuracy (kit reveal dates, brand names, group allocations), affiliate-link compliance, and any commerce-adjacent advice. Anything sizing, care, fakes-vs-real, or specifically child-safety-relevant gets reviewed by an adult before going live.
- Publish. The post lands with both Jake's byline and an “Edited by Toc” line where the post touches commerce.
- Update. Date-sensitive content (kit-reveal dates, draw outcomes, kick-off times) is re-checked weekly during the pre-tournament window and after every major tournament event.
Affiliate disclosure
Footy Kits Battle is part of the Amazon Associates programme (UK tag: footykitsbattle-21). We earn a small commission when readers buy through links on the site, at no extra cost to you.
Inline disclosure appears next to every block of affiliate links on every page — not just in the footer. We never write a buying recommendation for a kit, frame, projector or piece of merch we haven't personally researched, and we don't accept paid placements (sponsored content is clearly labelled as such on the rare occasions it appears).
Full breakdown including all retailer relationships, brand partnerships and any sponsorship is on our affiliate disclosure page.
Corrections policy
If we get something wrong, the policy is simple:
- Factual errors (kit reveal dates, brand names, group allocations) are fixed within 24 hours of being reported. The fix gets a visible “Corrected: … ” line at the bottom of the page.
- Provenance corrections (kit photo sourcing) update the public manifest within 24 hours and the page changes silently.
- Affiliate-link errors (broken link, wrong product, retailer compliance flag) are removed immediately on report and re-added only after the fix is verified.
- Opinion pieces (kit rankings, “best kit of [year]” lists) won't be retracted just because a reader disagrees — but if the underlying facts were wrong, the opinion gets re-written and the change is visible.
Spotted something? Email via the contact link in the footer and flag the URL plus what's wrong. We'll respond.
AI use
We use AI tools (Claude, mostly) for code generation, schema markup, copy editing, and as a research partner against tools like DataForSEO, Polymarket and the live football-X conversation. Every piece of public-facing copy is reviewed by Jake or Toc before it ships — AI doesn't publish on its own. We also don't run AI-generated kit imagery; everything image-side is sourced from official manufacturer press releases per the sourcing policy above.
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