Football faces the Wikipedia test

From the articles on major international clubs to the profiles of their respective Presidents, the white paper .wikipedia Football shows how the free encyclopaedia is becoming one of the key arenas in which the reputation of global football is shaped. And why ignoring it is no longer an option.

Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona each receive more than 4 million annual views on Wikipedia. Yet the most revealing figure concerns risk rather than visibility: 38% of the articles on clubs show clear issues, while 40% of the Presidents considered do not have a dedicated article and more than one third of the existing biographies display alerts or structural problems. In other words, a decisive part of global football’s reputation is shaped in a completely open, highly visible space that no club truly controls.

That is the starting point for the Special Edition of .wikipedia on Football: two interconnected analyses – Clubs and Presidents, on a global scale – examining how football is portrayed in the encyclopaedia. The finding is clear: popularity is extremely high, but quality remains uneven. Major Italian and international clubs dominate in terms of traffic and presence, while Presidents are the weakest part of the sample, albeit with differences mainly linked to their profile beyond football. 

Who we analysed and how

To understand where these differences come from, we started at the heart of the encyclopaedic portrayal of global football: the articles on clubs and their Presidents. We analysed the English-language articles on 80 of the most prominent clubs on the international stage, selected from the IFFHS Top 100 rankings for 2021-2025 and from the participants in the main club competitions organised by UEFA and FIFA, together with their respective Presidents. The methodology combined community activity and content quality, considering views, edits (frequency and type of changes), structure, sources and alerts.

Why risk comes first 

This is where the most delicate issue emerges. Wikipedia is not a promotional space. It is a public ecosystem built on neutrality, verifiability and transparency. Therefore, intervening without understanding the rules and dynamics of the community can produce the opposite of the intended effect: reverted edits, warnings, account blocks, editorial disputes and reputational damage visible to everyone. Yet inaction also comes at a cost: information gaps, weak content, and incomplete, outdated or misleading narratives, sometimes shaped by passion as well as hostile, polarised or openly confrontational interpretations. On Wikipedia, every mistake remains. And every silence has consequences.

INTERNATIONAL SAMPLE HIGHLIGHTS

Clubs, Presidents and AI: a strategic issue

The point is that the effects of these dynamics now extend far beyond the free encyclopaedia. Football teams’ role is no longer confined to the pitch: they are players in the global media system, brands facing reputational dynamics increasingly similar to those of major companies. The stakes are even higher in the AI era: Wikipedia content feeds search engines and artificial intelligence systems. This means that every information gap can be amplified and every inaccuracy can spread far beyond the encyclopaedia. For clubs and their leaders, engaging with this space has therefore become a strategic responsibility.