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Who publishes this
Organisational authorship, with accountable review
Footy Kits Battle Editorial
Research, rankings and kit opinion
Public articles and rankings use the Footy Kits Battle Editorial byline. Opinion is labelled as opinion; release, product and historical claims are checked against the source model used by the relevant page.
We do not publish private staff identities, ages or invented guest-author biographies as credibility signals.
Commerce and trust review
Evidence before recommendation
Commerce-adjacent pages are reviewed for source quality, release status, product identity, sizing limits, marketplace wording and affiliate disclosure. A retailer search never becomes an exact product or live offer.
Corrections and commercial correspondence use the public contact route. Recommendations are published by the organisation, not attributed to a private individual.
How the kit ranking works
The Kit Clash leaderboard at /leaderboard/ is generated from anonymous head-to-head votes. It is a community signal, not a count of unique fans or a certified survey. We don't hand-rank that table or weight votes from a named source. The mechanism uses an Elo-style rating system.
- 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 visuals come from
National-team hosted visuals and their research source URLs are tracked in the public manifest at /kits/manifest.json . Release evidence and FKB's right to host a visual are separate questions.
Current club cards use sponsor- and crest-free editorial colour studies. Every such visual must visibly say “Editorial colour study — not a product photo”. It helps with colour orientation but cannot prove an exact design, badge, sponsor treatment or product identity.
Exact Product Proof links to source-owned official photography and details; FKB does not copy, screenshot, hotlink, strip watermarks from or recreate those product photos. A future on-site product photo requires an approved licensed or affiliate-feed source tied to the exact product identity and its usage terms.
Editorial process
Every piece of content on the site goes through this lane:
- Brief. The editorial review sets an angle and a target query (e.g. “World Cup 2026 dark horses, ranked” or “Brazil 2026 home kit review”).
- Draft. The editorial desk writes the kit analysis and clearly labelled verdicts.
- Edit. A commerce/trust review checks 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 receives an additional safety check before going live.
- Publish. The post lands with the Footy Kits Battle Editorial organisation byline and the appropriate source, review-date and affiliate disclosure.
- 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.
Primary buyer-decision blocks label paid links close to the relevant retailer routes, while the sitewide footer and full disclosure page explain the programme in detail. Noncommissioned official-store and editorial links are never relabelled as affiliate links. We do not accept paid placements; any sponsored content would be clearly labelled as such.
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 for code assistance, structured-data checks, copy editing and research support. Public claims still require the source and review rules above, and generated material does not publish itself. AI-generated or reconstructed product photography is not used as proof of an official shirt.
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