![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/dezerbi-e1781880601445-1038x778.jpg\")
\n An AI-generated article on Football Blog<\/p>\n
\n An AI-generated article on Football Blog<\/p>\n
Three reputable sport news websites \u2013 She Kicks, Football Blog and Sportscasting \u2013 have introduced AI-generated reporters whose reports are strewn with errors and fabrications.\u00a0<\/p>\n
All three sites were bought by digital marketing outfit Clickout Media<\/a> in recent months, a business which has a history of buying once-viable websites to harvest their good reputations with Google to market online casinos<\/a> (whilst replacing human writers with AI avatars).<\/p>\n Previously, these three football brands employed multiple human journalists. She Kicks is the website for Britain\u2019s oldest women\u2019s football magazine, which has been published since 1996, with the website live since 2001. Football Blog has been published since 2004.\u00a0<\/p>\n New reporters have steadily appeared on She Kicks, such as Isabella Torres<\/a>, producing AI-written versions of articles which have previously appeared elsewhere online.\u00a0<\/p>\n A recent report on this year\u2019s Women\u2019s FA Cup Final pitting Manchester City against Brighton (published, then rapidly taken down<\/a>, but screenshotted by Press Gazette) is riddled with basic errors.\u00a0<\/p>\n The report got the score wrong (2-0, whereas in fact it was 4-0), with the goalscorers and descriptions of the goals also incorrect.\u00a0<\/p>\n There were also multiple players described as playing who are either not in the teams or who had already left.\u00a0<\/p>\n The site also refers to manager Gareth Taylor, who actually left Manchester City last year and now manages Liverpool. <\/p>\n Quotes attributed to Taylor also appeared to be made up, appearing online only in SheKicks and OneFootball <\/a>(which reprinted the initial SheKicks report).\u00a0<\/p>\n Another recent report on She Kicks said that the Liverpool women\u2019s team manager is Matt Beard, whereas Beard actually left the club last year and died last September and was riddled wither other basic errors.<\/p>\n Other articles on the football websites taken over by Clickout Media contain fabricated quotes.\u00a0<\/p>\n For example, a recent Sportscasting article<\/a>, based on an interview England footballer Declan Rice gave to British Vogue, includes the quotes: \u201cEven the older generation, the lads who have been here for a long time, get on so well with the younger boys coming through. There are no cliques, it\u2019s just one big group \u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone is laughing, everyone is talking. It doesn\u2019t matter if you have 100 caps or zero; you\u2019re treated the same.\u201d<\/p>\n These quotes do not appear in the original British Vogue article by Olivia Marks, and appear nowhere else online except in Sportscasting.\u00a0<\/p>\n The article comes up as 100% AI-generated in the AI checker Pangram. <\/p>\n On Football Blog, an article about a warning<\/a> delivered by Tottenham manager Roberto De Zerbi features an AI-generated image of Zerbi, and looks completely different to the real press conference discussed in the article. <\/p>\n The article is flagged as 100% AI-generated on checking service Pangram.<\/p>\n Authors appear to be AI-generated<\/p>\n Byline pictures of authors Isabella Torres<\/a> on She Kicks, Steve Adams<\/a> on Football Blog and Matthew Bancroft<\/a> on sportscasting are all AI-generated, according to checking service Identifai.\u00a0<\/p>\n All three have very little profile online bar their byline pages on the three sports sites. <\/p>\n Each of the writers is hugely prolific, producing multiple articles per day along with articles themed around sports betting and casinos.\u00a0<\/p>\n Press Gazette has spoken to former employees on condition of anonymity who describe a chaotic working culture and layoffs in favour of AI. <\/p>\n Clickout Media\u2019s turnover was \u00a340 million in 2024, the last year for which data was available, although the company declared a loss of \u00a33 million and thus paid no tax.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company\u2019s modus operandi appears to be to buy reputable websites, replace reporters with AI to cut costs and fill the sites with lucrative casino and betting content. Press Gazette understands it may have done this to hundreds of websites.\u00a0<\/p>\n Google takes a dim view of the practice, so sites are often penalised (including by being de-indexed, where they no longer appear in results) at which point Clickout simply abandons the site.\u00a0<\/p>\n But on one gaming site bought by Clickout, EsportsInsider, Google penalised the site, but Clickout appealed the penalty. <\/p>\n The site now ranks number one in Google search resuts for the term \u201cnon-gamstop casino\u201d in the UK (Gamstop is a service designed to stop problem gamblers accessing online sites).\u00a0<\/p>\n The site attracts 418,000 visits per month, according to estimates from Ahrefs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Clickout Media\u2019s Kristoffer Holten explained the business model on a podcast recorded in 2023: \u201cThe casinos are struggling to get players themselves and they\u2019re all competing. So they want to pay individuals like us to get them as many players as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnd the higher the value, the better. So basically it is sending players to the casinos, to the operators, and you get either a fixed fee, a revenue share, a flat fee for even showing them just a banner or something. And that\u2019s the name of the game. And the more traffic you bring, the more money you\u2019ll make.\u201d<\/p>\n Press Gazette contacted Clickout media and its executives in advance of publication but has heard nothing in response.<\/p>\n Holt said that SEO organisations such as Clickout can take up to 35% of the money gamblers lose, and explains that Clickout plunges some of their profits into buying new sites.\u00a0.<\/p>\n Holten said: \u201cWell, obviously there is a parasite part of it. We have the money to invest in parasites. Then we buy up sites. We buy new sites. That\u2019s really lucrative for us, buying up large new sites all the way up to a few million dollars per acquisition, transforming those into casino sites and crypto sites. We\u2019re really successful at that. And that\u2019s obviously something that we\u2019re not the only ones that do this. Every single gambling firm out there does this, but we\u2019re just quicker at doing the transaction, actually bringing money on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n \n
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