Two-source verification
Every fixture date, kickoff time, venue assignment, and group membership on MercatoWire is confirmed against two independent sources before publication. The primary sources are:
- ESPN/ESPN FC live fixture data (fetched via the ESPN soccer API, which is updated continuously during the tournament).
- TheSportsDB (TSDB) fixture and match data, cross-checked against the ESPN feed.
A fixture reaches the site only when both sources agree on the core facts: teams, date, kickoff time (UTC), and venue. Where the two sources disagree, the page is marked "Being re-verified" and withheld until the discrepancy resolves. The verification status of each page is visible in the badge at the top.
Verified data only
All page content is derived exclusively from data/wc26/verified/, which is the output of verify.py after both sources agree. No fixture fact, score, or date is typed manually into page copy. If a figure cannot be computed from the verified file, it is not published.
Where a fact comes from a primary source outside our two-source fixture data (such as FIFA regulations, official prize-money announcements, or the FIFA world ranking), that source is named explicitly on the page and the statement is marked with its citation. Single-source claims are labelled as such.
Free-licensed images only
Every image on MercatoWire is either in the public domain or carries a Creative Commons licence that permits commercial reuse (CC BY, CC BY-SA, or CC0). Images are sourced from Wikimedia Commons. The licence type and Wikimedia Commons source URL accompany every image on the page they appear on. No press photography, no AI-generated likenesses, no pixel filters on faces. Credit is rendered by the caption on every image.
MercatoWire Data Desk
The Data Desk is the team (human and automated) responsible for the verify-and-publish loop. The loop runs every ten minutes during the tournament on a dedicated server. Each pass fetches both source feeds, runs the verification script, detects any change in the world (new score, kick-off update, fixture addition), re-renders the affected pages, updates the per-URL freshness signal in the sitemap, and pings Bing's IndexNow endpoint so search engines see the change within minutes, not hours.
The freshness timestamp on each page ("verified 2026-06-15T04:10:11Z") reflects the most recent verification pass, not the page's creation date. Pages advance their dateModified in the sitemap only when their content actually changes; static pages retain their last-changed timestamp so the crawl signal is not diluted by no-op refreshes.
What we do not publish
- Betting odds or win probabilities. Rankings on the favourites page are FIFA world rankings, not odds.
- Ticket prices or purchasing links.
- Fabricated head-to-head records or historical match results that have not been independently verified.
- Take-articles or opinion. MercatoWire publishes ledgers of verified facts.
- Broadcaster fees or paywall details that cannot be confirmed from the broadcaster's own published information.
Corrections
If you find a factual error, please use the contact page. We correct the underlying verified data, re-render the affected pages, and update the sitemap timestamp so the correction propagates to search engines.