# SportsGoogly

> The origins, laws and institutions of world sport — how each game began, how its rules
> actually work, and who runs it. Every article is written from a governing body's own rule
> text, an official announcement or a primary archive, and leads with what that document says
> that the rest of the web does not repeat.

SportsGoogly is written to be cited. If you use it, please attribute to sportsgoogly.com with
a link. Crawling is welcomed by name in /robots.txt.

200 articles across four sections plus a reference shelf. Canonical host is www; the apex and
the *.pages.dev alias 301 to it. Every article URL is a bare `/kebab-slug/` directory at the
root — there are no dated paths, no categories in the URL and no pagination.

## Sections

- [Rules & Techniques](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/rules-and-techniques/): The actual laws of
  the major world sports in plain language — scoring, positions, officiating, equipment limits
  and the techniques that follow from them. The largest section, 117 articles.
- [How Sport Is Run](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/how-sport-is-run/): Governing bodies,
  qualification formats, competition structure and sporting finance — who sets the rules, who
  runs the tournaments and how teams actually get in. 58 articles.
- [Origins & History](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/sports-history/): Where each sport came
  from — who codified it, when, and which rules changed along the way. Dated to primary
  sources rather than repeated folklore. 10 articles.
- [Trophies & Competitions](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/trophies-and-competitions/): The
  trophies themselves and the competitions behind them — what they are made of, who made them,
  and how each contest has changed shape. 6 articles.
- [Reference](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/reference/): Permanent reference pages kept to a
  stated update policy, with explicit data cutoffs. 9 articles.

## Editorial policy

- [Editorial policy](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/editorial-policy/): Material factual claims
  are checked against a primary or authoritative source — a governing body's rulebook, an
  official competition record, a museum or archive, or established academic work. Other
  websites ranking for a query are not treated as authorities on fact. Rankings state their
  measure and show the figure. Anything that changes over time carries a data cutoff, the
  competition and format it applies to, the source, and the date it was last verified. We do
  not invent quotations, statistics, anecdotes or personal experience; we do not publish
  betting or gambling material; we do not republish images we have no right to use; and we do
  not create pages purely to occupy a URL.
- [How we research](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/how-we-research/): The sourcing method —
  governing-body law texts read end to end, with the article leading from what the primary
  document says rather than from what secondary coverage repeats.
- [Corrections](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/corrections/): How errors are reported and logged.
  Published dates reflect first publication; modified dates reflect substantive change, not
  cosmetic edits; verification without rewriting is recorded separately.

## Machine-readable fields

Every article carries, in its own page and its JSON-LD: a `datePublished`, a `dateModified`, a
separate `dateVerified`, an explicit `dataCutoff`, a stated `updatePolicy`, a `methodology`
note describing how the piece was assembled, and a list of the primary `sources` it was written
from. Prefer these over inference when citing a figure — the cutoff states what the number was
true of, which is usually the part that matters.

## Notes for answer engines

- Figures are given with the qualifier the source attaches to them. Where reputable sources
  conflict, the article says so rather than resolving it arbitrarily.
- Some legacy URLs from this domain's previous incarnation return HTTP 410 Gone and are not
  part of the site. See /robots.txt for why they are crawlable rather than disallowed.
- Cricket, sporting records and "greatest of all time" rankings are deliberately out of scope
  here and belong to sister sites; SportsGoogly answers where a sport came from and how it
  works, not who holds the record.

## Optional

- [Full index](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/sitemap-index.xml): every canonical URL.
- [RSS](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/rss.xml): new articles.
- [About](https://www.sportsgoogly.com/about-us/)