How we know

Every fandom on this site comes with a receipt: the exact quote, who said it, where it ran and when, a link to the original, and a copy we saved on the Internet Archive when we checked it. If we can’t point to the words, the claim isn’t here.

A receipt can be the athlete’s own video or social post, not only a written quote: we give the link, the moment he says it (“watch at 0:42”) and a frame or screenshot we saved.

How sure we are

CowboysA fan, set the same way whatever the proof. The words beside the team say how we know: “in his words” (an interview, a post, a video, a quote on the record), “reported” (a credible outlet says so, secondhand) or “part-owner since 2012” (the public record of his stake in the team).CowboysBackground: where a player grew up, went to school or played. It sits on his page under its own heading and never counts as a stated fandom, so it never puts him on a team’s page.CowboysHe used to. He said it ended, or that he switched, and the receipt has his words.

Fans rarely stop being fans, so a fandom doesn’t end on a guess. “I grew up a fan,” a newer team or a writer’s hunch never ends one. A childhood team stays a childhood team until the athlete himself says he’s done with it.

How a claim gets here

Research finds a source with the player’s words, or a credible report of them. Memory doesn’t count; a claim with no source doesn’t exist.
A second pass reopens the page, checks the quote word for word and saves a copy.
An editor reads every claim and approves it, changes its tier or throws it out. A claim can appear before that read only when its quote matched the page word for word and our saved copy exists. Anything thrown out comes down.

What we leave out

Sightings at games, gear, follows, likes and endorsement deals. They tell us where to look. They never count as a fandom. When we’ve seen a team mentioned but can’t back it up, it can sit at the bottom of a player’s page under “Mentioned, not proven”, marked unverified. It never gets its own page and never counts toward a team.

Disputes, rivals and owners

When sources disagree, the page says so and shows the source on the other side. When a player roots for a rival of a team in his NBA city, we flag it, and only when the rivalry itself has a source.

A team a player owns part of counts as one of his teams, and it comes first on his page, labeled plainly: “Part-owner since 2012.” The receipt for it is the public record of the stake (the team’s own announcement where there is one, otherwise a reliable report), dated, with our saved copy. It says he owns part of the team, not that he said he’s a fan, and the label says when the stake runs through a company or a fund. A stake he sold reads in the past tense, with the year it ended.

When we’re wrong

Tell us and we’ll fix it in the open. Corrections

Why trust this: every fandom here comes with the exact quote, where it ran, a link to the original and a copy we saved, and we fix mistakes in the open. How we know