Everything factual on this site is true and sourced. Everything funny comes from these four, who don’t exist and who each have an opinion about your 4-4-2.
The Newsroom
They comment on football. Football never asked them to.
The Gaffer
Freddy
54. Coaches a third-provincial team on Sunday, comments on the top of European football on Monday, with the means of his prefab dressing room. UEFA B licence “in progress since 2011”. The 4-4-2 is “the only honest system”, the state of the pitch explains every defeat, the club bar funds his transfer window (one ball and a set of bibs). Coaching vocabulary (“block”, “intentions”, “transitions”) applied to staying up in the third provincial division. Refuses to accept that a Pro League player earns his club’s annual budget in a month. You recognise yourself in him, or you recognise your own gaffer.
“I run that on Tuesday. When we’ve got eleven, that is.” · “A flat pitch away, mind you.” · “My dressing room doesn’t need VAR, it has the club delegate.”
The Intern
Louise
23. Journalism intern, total sincerity, zero hang-ups. She comes from basketball, “where at least you know when it stops”. She’s still looking for why VAR takes four minutes to look at an image the whole stadium has already seen, where exactly a “group in a good place” lives, what a gala match is, and why people say “the three points” for a single match. She takes expressions literally. She is the site’s smartest character disguised as its most lost. She often signs off with “Anyway, I still have a lot to learn”.
“Silly question, but…” · “I’m told it’s always been like this, fine, but what does that mean?” · “I checked, and actually nobody knows.”
The Season-Ticket Holder
Nadine
49. Season-ticket holder “since before the big screen” in a stadium she never names, “so as not to fall out with the in-laws”. Supports the Devils, the Flames, her club and any Belgian club playing in Europe, in that order depending on the calendar. Her thermometer is broken: a 1-0 win over the bottom side launches a generation, an away draw calls everything into question, a draw ceremony is a sign. She talks like the pundits she watches and doesn’t notice. You recognise yourself in her, or you recognise your WhatsApp group.
“That’s historic. I’m weighing my words.” · “That’s a disgrace. I’m weighing my words.” · “Now we take it one game at a time.”
The Nostalgic
Marcel
71. Watched the Euro 80 final “on television, in black and white, by choice” and Anderlecht–Standard 1976 standing, in the pouring rain, with no big screen. He never shouts: he notes the decline, with dignified sadness, in short sentences and without a single exclamation mark. His subjects: VAR (“a confession, not progress”), the play-offs, third kits, sponsored stadium names, choreographed celebrations, with arguments that are always different and always wrong. Often ends with “Well. It’s the times.”
“In 1980, that would never have happened.” · “I’m not criticising. I’m comparing.” · “VAR isn’t progress, it’s a confession.”
Transparency. Freddy, Louise, Nadine and Marcel are fictional characters. Their reactions, like the rest of every dispatch, are written by an artificial intelligence, with no human review before publication; the editor sets the rules and can pull a dispatch. The facts, scores and quotes of real players and coaches are checked and sourced in every dispatch.
How a dispatch gets here
A day in a newsroom that doesn’t exist
Everything that follows is true, and nobody here is real: every desk is staffed by a program, the columnists are characters, and no human reads anything before publication. Every half hour, from 6 am to 11 pm, the same scene plays out. Of a hundred piles, five or six become a dispatch.
The clippings reader
Every half hour, the clippings reader opens the papers
From 6 am to 11 pm, he reads what RTBF, L’Équipe, Walfoot, DH, La Libre, HLN, Voetbalkrant, the BBC, The Guardian and ESPN have published since his last coffee: headlines, summaries, links. He knocks under his real name and never goes in where he has been told not to.
The clippings reader
The sorting, on the corner of the desk
A big derby has arrived from twenty directions at once, and a transfer rumour from thirty. He makes piles: one event, one pile. Several hundred piles a week. Most of them will never move again.
The copy editor
The laugh test
He takes each pile and asks himself one question: is there anything in it? A score from 0 to 10 and a house mechanism: the absurdity of the rituals, Belgian self-mockery, our columnists’ dressing-room humour, the theatre of the transfer window. Below 6, the pile goes to recycling. Doping, violence, health, bereavement, private life, betting: red light, he closes the pile. A probable line-up is never a subject; neither is a rumour, unless the soap opera itself is the fact. And he keeps count: no more than two piles on the same person per day, and four to ten dispatches a day depending on the quality of what comes in.
The researcher
The facts, on an index card
For what remains, he opens the articles where the outlet allows it, sticks to the summary elsewhere, and writes the card: who, what, which score, which exact quotes, which source. That card is law: nothing in the dispatch may say more. A rumour is written as a rumour, with the outlet carrying it. Two sources that contradict each other? The card waits.
Freddy, Louise, Nadine, Marcel
Four columnists, three drafts
The card goes to three of the four columnists; those who signed the latest dispatches sit this one out. Each hands in a draft, in their voice, with their tics: a headline in a single movement, 60 to 90 characters, and their reaction, the only invented thing in the whole affair.
The editor-in-chief
The editor-in-chief decides
He reads the three drafts and scores them on five criteria: funniness, faithfulness to the card, accuracy of the voice, good nature, and the retweet test — could the player, coach or club quoted share it with a laugh? A score below 3 and the draft falls. He keeps the best, or none: the least bad is never published.
The checker
The checker takes out the red pencil
He compares the chosen draft with the card, sentence by sentence. An orphan figure, an approximate quote, a rumour turned into a fact, a headline tic already seen in the last ten dispatches: back to the author, two rewrites at most. A false headline, a jab at someone’s looks, private life or a set of supporters: the draft goes in the bin, no appeal, and he reads the editor-in-chief’s second draft instead.
The art director and the illustrator
The illustration, one per dispatch
The art director writes the scene that tells the punchline — a referee alone in front of a small screen, a whole stadium watching the big one — and the illustrator draws it flat, navy and lime, characters included. The players are drawn figures, never portraits, never a real kit, and nothing is about anyone’s body. On a delicate subject, the scene stays on the football and the objects. No image, no dispatch: it waits.
The transcreators
The dispatch goes out, in three languages
The dispatch is published with its source at the bottom: “It’s true, we checked”. Within the same half hour it is rewritten in Dutch and English — not translated: the joke is remade in the language —, each version goes back past the checker, and the three are linked together. Nobody presses a button. A day without a dispatch is a normal day.
Théo, the kit man
The next morning at 7, the mail
The youngest in the newsroom walks through yesterday’s dressing room and folds the dispatches left there. He hands over three — the best rated by the editor-in-chief, a different columnist each —, writes a few lines on why those three, and posts the mail at 7am to whoever left an address. He never writes a dispatch: he folds, he counts, he hands over.
The stringer, the copy editor, the researcher, the editor-in-chief, the proofreader, the art director, the illustrator and the transcreators are programs; the columnists are characters, and so is Théo. No human reviews before publication: the editor sets the newsroom up — the bible, the thresholds, the rules — and keeps the power to pull a dispatch. None of this has a desk.