That’s right. It’s “who watches the watchmen?” time here at Eurovision Fam, or more exactly, “who reviews the reviewers?”
One of the most anticipated days in the calendar of a Sanremo enthusiast is Press Day, the day in which the music critics who have been blessed to hear this year’s Sanremo songs publish their initial rankings and brief reviews. The reviewers are summoned to Rai offices where Carlo Conti and other Rai staff oversee the listening experience. They listen to all 30 songs one after another, with only a single break. They aren’t hearing them live with the orchestra, they aren’t rewinding and listening to them closely a second or third time. This is all first-listen-gut-instinct notes. A lot of the reviewers talk more about their emotional experience of listening, than the technical merits of the production or musicianship. Oftentimes, the reviewers feel differently about the songs once performed live during Sanremo week. However, when we’re out here starving for clues about what to expect during Sanremo week, it’s hard not to want to overanalyze these press rankings and notes, and that’s just what I’ve spent the last three weeks doing.
One of my biggest frustrations looking at the press rankings and scores is how every critic from these 20 outlets is essentially using their own rating system. Points are all awarded on a scale of one to ten, but with scores as high as 10 and as low as 3, and very few critics using the edges of that range. When some outlets are only using numbers between 6 and 7.5 for all 30 songs, it’s hard to feel like there’s much, or any, value in their review. Are all the songs that uniform in quality? Are they all just a little better than average, with no standouts or duds? Or is that critic or outlet more concerned with not hurting feelings or losing access to particular celebrities?
Very often, you’ll find people online who have compiled the scores and then averaged out the totals to get a quick look at who’s in the running for this year’s crown. This is a great and helpful tool, but this year I wanted to dive a little deeper. As mentioned above, I find it unclear whether the point totals mean the same thing to each reviewer, and it makes it difficult to really compare the songs, which is what I want to be able to discern: how do they stack up against one another?
Before I could assess this to my liking, I needed to take a couple steps. Originally, I noticed that some sites were scoring everyone roughly the same (6 artists with their top score and 6 artists with their lowest score, for example). My first guess what that this was about access, and so I was planning to quarantine those few publications, but when I looked more closely, I found more issues that made me less trusting of other sources as well.
To determine which ones I trusted most, I looked at a couple different factors. The scores had anywhere between a 5-point to a 1.5-point spread. Any outlet with less than a 4-point spread* did not get placed in the “higher quality” side of my spreadsheet, with the exception of Newsic. Newsic only had a three-point spread, but within those 3 points, they gave a wide variety of decimal scores (6.9. 6.75, 6.25, etc.) that still allowed for greater separation amongst the scoring. One outlet that did have a larger spread, Rockit, still did not get moved into the higher quality side of the spreadsheet, because they had a 2.5-point difference between their top song and everybody else, which meant only a 2.5-point spread for all intents and purposes. I wound up with ten sources I trusted more than the other ten. I then ran four sets of averages, I took the traditional average, the traditional average of just my ten trusted sources, the relativized average and the relativized average of the trusted sources.
I’m sharing screenshots of my spreadsheets, as well as the spreadsheet itself, for those of you who are like me and enjoy this stuff. For the rest of you, here’s a quick recap of my overall findings:
Brunori Sas was top ranked by the press, no matter which way I sliced the data. In fact, the top five doesn’t change at all between the traditional and relativized averages, but there is an order shake-up with the HQ sources. In the traditional HQ standing, Giorgia moves up to 2nd, and Simone moves to 3rd, with the rest of the order staying the same, while in the relativized HQ set, the top 5 in order is Brunori Sas, Lucio Corsi, Achille Lauro, Giorgia and Simone Cristicchi.
The biggest shakeup comes for The Kolors, who rise 7 spots to place in 10th with the HQ scores. Likewise Massimo Ranieri climbs to number 9, four slots up from his 13th place amongst all 20 sources. The other interesting (to me) movement was that in the relativized HQ scorebook, Tony Effe drops 5 spots to 16th, while Fedez rises 3 places to 17th, putting these two artists who’ve some personal animosity much closer in the standings. It makes me wonder (and if you know, leave a comment), if perhaps some of the legacy media that landed on the right-hand side of my spreadsheet have a pro-Tony Effe or anti-Fedez bias. I want to know! (I love mess.)
A few points of note from the last few years of press scores: Recent winners Angelina Mango (2nd), Marco Mengoni (1st), Mahmood and Blanco (5th), and Maneskin (3rd) all averaged in the top 5 of the press preview scores using the traditional averaging method. (I did not go back and relativize scores for past years. This is a 2025 experiment, and I’ll know in a week if it was time well-spent or not.) However, last year Loredana Berte was ranked 1st by the press during previews, but placed seventh overall. (She did win the critics award named for her late sister, Mia Martini.) Annalisa held steady in 3rd place throughout, while Negramaro and Diodato rounded out the pre-show top 5, but ended up in 19th and 13th place, respectively.
However, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for someone from outside the top 5 in the preview round to receive a good result. Continuing with our examples from last year, Geolier (2nd) and Ghali (4th) ended up in the top 5 overall, but the press preview had them in 12th and T-17th place. Irama tied with Ghali for 17th based on press scores and also finished in the top 5 in 2024 (5th). This is a pattern for him, as in 2022 (4th) and 2021 (5th) he also finished top 5 despite his preview ranking being 18th in those years. His preview ranking this year again falls between 17-19 depending on the version, but with his devoted fanbase, it’s fair to expect to see him in or near the top 5 regardless. All of that to say, these press rankings give us hints, but not a clear picture.
Do I feel like I learned anything from doing this that I didn’t already know from just looking at the scores? Maybe. You can see the bias for against certain acts more clearly when you break it down like this, and it’s worth remembering that the press determines the night one scores as well as 33% of the final score this year.
Stay tuned for more Sanremo news and analysis!
(Methodology – I used math, ratios and fractions and decimals and whatnot, to relativize every set of scores on a scale of 1-5, with that critic’s highest rated song/songs getting a 5, and their lowest song getting a 1. Is it possible some of my math is wrong? Almost certainly. Am I going to triple check it? It’s already taken me three weeks to get this far. Please comment and let me know if my math is bad. Show your work, and provide a formula. I did have to round some numbers, because needs must.)
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