Why we built SportsMaze

Picture a group of friends watching a match. Something happens, half the room says it is out and the other half says it is not. Somebody searches. They find a rule book of a hundred pages written in legal language, a forum thread with ten answers that disagree, and a video that starts with two minutes of introduction. The match has moved on by then.

That argument is where SportsMaze started. When friends fight over a rule, they should be able to come to one place and settle it in a minute.

The problem is bigger than rules

Once we looked closely, not knowing a rule turned out to be only one of the things that keep people out of a sport.

• The words. Every sport has its own vocabulary. A beginner hears "repechage", "free hit" or "golden point" and loses the thread.
• Too many sports. Dozens of sports run at the same time, each with its own season and its own tournaments. Nobody can be expected to know where to look.
• Not knowing what matters. Coverage follows a handful of the biggest events. Which titles count most in a sport, and which are minor, is rarely explained anywhere. Women's sport and para sport get even less attention, at every level.
• Being afraid to ask. Many people never ask a basic question because they do not want to look lost in front of people who already know.
• Not knowing what to trust. An old article, a clickbait post and an official document can look the same to someone new.

A rules page alone fixes only the first of these. So SportsMaze tries to deal with all of them.

What we built

A starting point for every sport. Each of the more than 110 sports opens with how a match works: the shape of a match in about a minute, before any rule. Then the rules you need first, then the ones that change results, then the rare cases.

Rules one question at a time. Each rule page answers one question a viewer would ask, and the answer comes first: out or not out, yes or no. How it works comes after, then the tricky cases people argue about, then where the rule differs between competitions.

Words by level. The terms you hear in every match first, the ones regular viewers use next.

Tournaments with their history. Who holds the title, who won before, how often it is played and how the format works, so you can tell a world championship from a minor event.

Countries counted from results. Which nations have done best in each sport, counted the same way for every country, from the podiums.

How we keep it honest

Rules are read from each sport's own rule book and results from the organisers' records. Rules and words carry the date they were last checked. Where a rule differs between competitions, we show the difference instead of picking one version. There are no betting tips, no odds and no gossip, because a site that helps people understand sport should not be trying to sell them a bet.

What comes next

SportsMaze is not finished. We keep checking pages against their sources and filling the gaps sport by sport. If a sport you follow is thin here, or you find a mistake, tell us. That is how the next page gets written.