Editorial policy

Who writes this site

Every page on Cleat & Cone is written by Ryder M., the hands-on owner behind Magoo Media Group. There is no editorial team, no freelance pool and no AI-generated filler published without review — one person is responsible for all of it, which is also why the byline on every page is a name rather than “Editorial Team”.

More on who that is, and what it does and does not imply, on the about page.

The standing rules

These are absolute. If following one of them makes a page less persuasive, the page gets less persuasive.

• No fabricated prices. We hold no live pricing, so no page quotes a number. Every buy button opens the current retailer listing.
• No fabricated ratings, scores or review counts. We have no review data of our own. There are none on the site and none in its structured data.
• No fabricated testimonials. We have no reviews of our own business, so there is no testimonials section anywhere.
• No claims of testing. We have not worn, kicked or measured anything. Where a page describes performance, it describes what the construction is designed to do — attributed to the manufacturer.
• No invented credentials. The author bio says only what is true. No coaching license, no playing history, no expert panel.
• No products we have not verified exist. Every product in our registry was confirmed as currently sold at build time by checking manufacturer and retailer listings.
• No external fact without a fetched source. Ball sizes, field dimensions, safety figures, medical context — all cited to a real URL, listed at the foot of the page. If a source could not be retrieved, the claim was cut.
• No invented search-volume claims. We have no volume data, so we make no statements about how many people search for anything.
• No medical advice. Where a page touches health — the Sever’s disease page in particular — it describes the condition only from cited clinical sources, states that it is not medical advice, and recommends seeing a doctor. It confines its own recommendations to cushioning and fit.

How recommendations are made

In full on how we pick. In summary: we start from real search queries organized by the child’s level, read the manufacturer’s published specifications, verify the product is currently sold, assess how its sizing behaves on a growing foot, and name at least one real limitation for every product we list.

A recommendation with no downside listed has not been finished.

Commission never affects a ranking

The site is funded by Amazon Associates commission — see the affiliate disclosure. Commission rates are not a factor in ranking order, and several of our top picks are the cheapest option in their category, which earns us the least.

Where the honest answer is that a reader should buy nothing, or wait a year, or use something they already own, we say so. Several pages do exactly that.

Update cadence

Every page carries a visible published date and a last-updated date, and the dates are real — they reflect when the content actually changed, not a build timestamp.

• Product roundups are re-checked on a rolling basis for availability and for whether the pick order still holds. A model that has been discontinued gets replaced, not left in place with a broken link.
• Sizing charts and standards pages are re-checked against the source when we revisit them, since league standards and manufacturer charts do occasionally change.
• Care and how-to guides change rarely, because the advice does.

We do not update a page’s date without changing its content. A freshness stamp that does not correspond to an edit is a small lie that makes every other date on the site meaningless.

How to report an error

Email contact@cleatandcone.com or use the contact form. It is genuinely useful and we act on it. If you can, include the page and what specifically is wrong.

How we correct things

1. Factual errors are fixed promptly and the last-updated date changes to reflect it.
2. A discontinued product is replaced with a current equivalent, rather than the page being left recommending something you cannot buy.
3. A correction that changes a recommendation is noted on the page, so a returning reader can see that the advice moved and why. We do not quietly rewrite a verdict.
4. A correction that changes nothing material — a typo, a broken link — is simply fixed.

Sponsored content

We do not publish sponsored posts, paid placements, or guest posts. No brand has paid for or influenced a recommendation on this site, and no brand has been given advance review of a page about its products.

If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the page in question and on the affiliate disclosure.

Use of AI

Worth being straightforward about, since every publisher is now asked. AI tooling is used in producing this site — for drafting and structuring — and every factual claim, product, specification and source on it was verified against a real source before publication, under the standing rules above. Nothing on this site is published because a model asserted it.

That is the same standard that applies to any other drafting tool: the author is responsible for what is published, and the rule against fabricated prices, ratings, products and credentials is what that responsibility looks like in practice.