TransferithmWC 2026
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Track record · year to date

How our signal has actually performed

Every figure shows its denominator, and every exclusion is disclosed — the source boards count resolved reports only, with open sagas held out (and counted) as pending, so the numbers can’t flatter us.

year to date· updated daily · ground truth: Sportmonks completions

What the RITHM score is. Every rumour gets a 0–100 score for how much the move adds up— a checklist of eleven things we can actually check: who reported it and how many outlets agree, whether the player’s contract is running down, whether the club needs that position, whether he fits the manager’s system, whether it’s a step up or down, his age against his position’s peak, past links to the club, and how late in the window we are.

It is not a percentage chance the transfer happens. A 60 does not mean 60% likely. It means the story is well-supported and the move makes sense on paper. We checked whether higher scores actually complete more often, and right now they don’t— so we show you the score’s reasoning, not a prediction. Building a real probability is the next job, and it will be labelled as one.

How to read this

Hit rate: of the deals we tracked that actually completed, how often our signal pointed the right way. n= shows how many cases each number is based on - a rate built on 12 cases is a hint, not a fact. Calibration: when our internal rating was higher, did deals actually complete more often? Timing edge: how many days before the official announcement we first flagged a deal. Source boards count resolved reports (completed, reported off, or older than 60 days); open sagas are shown as pending, never silently dropped.

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Source reliability

What a RITHM band has meant

Score quality

Tracked deals

Timing edge · early and growing

Completion rate — of a source’s resolved reports, the share whose move actually completed (Sportmonks-verified). A report is resolved when the move completed, was reported off, or is older than 60 days; open sagas are excluded from the denominator, so nobody is penalized for deals that have not had time to land.
Confirming-signal— a corroborating signal appeared in our sources after we flagged a rumor. Nota verified completed transfer — used by the Brier score, never by the source boards. The band chart above now uses real completions instead, which is the harder test.
T1–T5— the tier we gave an outlet when we added it. T1 means we expected it to be the most reliable, T5 the least. This is the rating our scoring uses today.
“earns T1”— the tier that outlet’s own record deserves. We take every early story it ran — a club is interested, nothing official yet — wait for those to settle, and count how many actually happened.
Only early stories count, and that is the whole point. Once a report says a deal is agreed, nearly every outlet is right, so those stories can’t separate a good source from a bad one. Guessing early is the hard part, so that is what we grade.
Only closed transfer windows count. That matters: inside an open window, a deal can only be settled by happening— the ones quietly dying are still pending — so every outlet looks better than it will on deadline day. Waiting for the window to shut is the only way to compare outlets on equal terms.
It is a hard test. Across closed windows, only about 1 in 10early “club are interested” stories ends in a transfer, so a 19% record is roughly twice the going rate, not a poor one.
An outlet needs at least 10 settled early stories before we’ll rate it, and a thin record is pulled toward that average — going 13-from-15 is a good run, not proof of genius. Outlets we can’t judge yet simply don’t get a second rating. It doesn’t change any score yet.
Ground truth— completed transfers come from Sportmonks; the timing edge is measured against those completion timestamps.
Suppression— outlet rows with fewer than 30 resolved reports (n<30) are hidden; journalist rows appear from n=10, and small samples carry a “Thin” label.