A Court Ruling Labelled 'Football': Notes from a Misclassified File

In my archive there is a file tagged “football”. Opening it, I found no team, no player, no scoreline, no minute of stoppage time. Only a court ruling. According to the Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office in Mexico, a woman named Kenia “N” was convicted of child abuse against her four minor children, in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, Jalisco. Attached to the sentence was a reparation payment of 1,294,853 pesos in favour of the victims. That is the entire content of the file. And yet it was just handed to me with one short instruction: write it up as sports news. I sat with it for a while. In thirty-six years covering this industry, I have met plenty of mislabelled files. A match with the wrong score. A transfer assigned to the wrong club. A scouting report that listed a midfielder’s strong foot incorrectly. But this one differs in kind, not degree. This is not a typo. This is a criminal case involving children, and it is being pushed into exactly the place it does not belong. According to what the Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office released, the events took place in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, a municipality inside the Guadalajara metropolitan area. Officers responded in the Quintas del Valle neighbourhood. The defendant was found to have abused her own four minor children. The ruling ordered her to pay 1,294,853 pesos as reparation for the victims’ damages. The record also notes injuries on the victims’ bodies as part of the legal evidence, and the identification of the victims was carried out through the proper procedural steps. The case was handled under an abbreviated procedure — a legal mechanism, not a tactical term. Not a single line in the record mentions football. There is no club. There is no manager, player, league, match or transfer. There is no expected-goals figure, no possession share, no running data. If I forced this story into a sports frame, I would have to invent a team, a player, a score. And I would turn a case of child abuse into entertainment material. Both of those things run against the principles of my craft. The problem lies elsewhere, and it deserves to be said plainly. A file like this slips into a football data stream because automatic classifiers do not read content; they read surface signals. A report coming out of Jalisco, Mexico, can be dumped into a sports bucket by some filter simply because Mexico is a large football market. One keyword, one place name, one source tag — a single mismatched fragment is enough to push the whole file into a label that is not its own. Digitisation has not made me faster, but it has forced me to be more honest with every number. My handling is simple and has become reflex. Before I write any conclusion, I cross-check at least two data sources. I ask “Why?” after every figure. What is this 1,294,853 pesos? It is a damages award to the victims under the ruling, not a transfer fee, not a player’s wage, not club revenue. Weighing it on the scales of the transfer market is a category error. And category errors, repeated often enough, generate a whole line of false news that looks entirely plausible. The irony is that the pressure comes from the opposite direction. In the daily news machine, a mislabelled file is usually handled the easiest way: just write some sports piece and be done, as long as it has enough words, enough keywords, enough to fill a blank slot on the publishing calendar. Someone might say I am overreacting. But I once watched a foreign scout cancel a contract over a single faulty GPS device on a pitch. A wrong number, if nobody questions it, becomes a wrong decision. A wrong label, if nobody removes it, becomes a prejudice. And here the wrong label is not merely technical. Behind it are four children. Turning their story into a sports item insults them. My profession taught me that there are limits not to be crossed, even when crossing them would be better for readership. At fifty-two, I still keep the beat with my ears — the one thing nobody has managed to digitise. And those ears tell me this file does not belong on a pitch. So what is the right handling? I separate two parts. The part that can be published: the legal facts the prosecutor’s office stated — the defendant, the offence, the location, the reparation, the procedural mechanism. The part to refuse: every attempt to give it a shirt, a stand, a scoreline. I return the file to its proper drawer. I note clearly that this is a classification error, so the system does not repeat it. And I tell the person who assigned it: if you need a football piece for that empty slot, let me go find a real story on the pitch, rather than build a fake one out of a court ruling. I am not writing this to scold an algorithm. I am writing to remind us that in any data pipeline, a human must remain the final gatekeeper. A machine can assign a label, but only a person knows when a label is wrong, and when that wrongness touches something that must not be touched. When technology changed how football stories are told, I quietly changed how I listen. This time, I listened, and I heard one thing: some files should not be opened with a football label, but closed with respect.