The 2026 Season: A Three-Minute Call at Dawn and a Sportswriter's Credibility

Dawn, August 2026. I sat beside the old rotary telephone in the newsroom, a cup of tea long gone cold. On the other end was an acquaintance who worked with a club from the port city, his voice lowered as if afraid of being overheard: “A team is asking to buy our number 10 striker. Word is the pay is double. But I can't be sure.”

Some phone calls last only three minutes, yet they change an entire season. The call ended, and I spent the whole morning with a single question: do I have enough grounds to write yet? If I wrote at once, I could be the first. If I waited, I could be the last. Between those two choices, I picked a third — go and verify.

In the 2026 season, our country was still poor, and information was worth more than gold. No social media, no transfer feed updated by the hour. A rumour travelling from one ground to another had to pass through people's mouths, through train journeys, through a few terse telegrams. Precisely because it was scarce, a rumour back then carried unusual weight: an unfounded sentence could unsettle a whole club, keep a player awake, split the terraces into two camps.

From my experience watching matches in that era, fans often learned the result only days after the final whistle. Yet one whisper — “he's leaving” — and the entire football village talked as if it were fact. The frightening part was not the rumour; it was that nobody checked, and everyone wanted to believe.

I called three people back. The first swore it was certain. The second said, “I heard it, but nothing official.” The third — the one I trusted most — laughed: “Don't rush. That doubled figure is an exaggeration.”

Three sources, three different answers. To me, that was not failure but data. When three independent channels fail to align, the misalignment itself is information: the deal is not ripe. A transfer story only has value when it passes the test of at least three independent sources and, more importantly, when the numbers inside it are internally consistent.

I devoted fully four-tenths of the piece to stating which sources were reliable, which were mere guesswork, and in what scenario the story could be entirely wrong. Many colleagues called me foolish: writing that way loses the “scoop” flavour. I thought differently. Readers do not need more noise. They need someone trustworthy.

What I learned that season also lay in a small detail: that number 10, if the rumour were inflated, would step onto the pitch under the pressure of a man said to be “leaving”. A player's form depends on many things, and an irresponsible rumour can be one of them. So when I look at a player, I try to see him across a full cycle, not through the eyes of one morning. Look at the person, not through public opinion.

In any era, the greatest temptation for a writer is not to say something false, but to say it early. When the whole newsroom waits for a line that says “just received”, silence looks like weakness. But there is an ironic truth: the first person to report something wrong is remembered longer than the last person to report it right. Speed can be bought with recklessness; credibility cannot be bought, only accumulated.

People often think a rumour is harmless because “it's only a rumour anyway”. But to a player and his family, nothing is “only”. An unverified word, written in a confident tone, outlives the truth, because it is more entertaining. That is the greatest blind spot of the trade: we think we are serving readers, when sometimes we are only serving our own curiosity.

Dawn never lies — people are the ones who can lie to each other. Thirty years on, I believe the one thing that never changes in this trade is credibility. The pitch will differ, the money will grow, the telephone will get faster, but readers will still ask only one question: is this writer trustworthy? And if you are a fan, would you rather read a fast story that is wrong, or a slow one that is right?