{"id":836,"date":"2017-03-02T13:20:20","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T13:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/?p=836"},"modified":"2017-03-02T13:23:29","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T13:23:29","slug":"football-the-origin-of-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/football-the-origin-of-fake-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Football: The Origin Of \u2018Fake News\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This isn\u2019t a political blog. Though I have never tried to make a secret of my political leanings within my writing, this isn&#8217;t a place for going off on one about things that are happening around the world. First and foremost it is a blog about Liverpool Football Club, with occasional references to non LFC matters should something catch my attention. I say all of that because I want to make clear from the outset that this piece isn\u2019t intended to be a political commentary. It\u2019s just that some things have happened this week that made me think about the connections between the coverage of \u2018football\u2019 over the years and the phenomenon that has become known as \u2018Fake News\u2019.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-partner=\"tweetdeck\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Warning!! Beware of fake news and don not fall for it!!<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/8HJ0VZPftQ\">https:\/\/t.co\/8HJ0VZPftQ<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/ENcdqj0AYU\">pic.twitter.com\/ENcdqj0AYU<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 radiodut.co.za (@RadioDUT) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/RadioDUT\/status\/837274604578213888\">March 2, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\u201cutf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Before I get into why football is so closely connected to this phenomenon I should firstly explain exactly what I understand it to be. Fake news is, in essence, \u2018news\u2019 that is completely untrue. In recent times websites and social media have been used by nefarious parties to push stories that have no basis in fact but that are easily believed by those who want to fall for it. It\u2019s been used to great affect by different political entities who know that their supporters will push out the \u2018fake\u2019 news story as it backs up their beliefs. What\u2019s happened over the last couple of months is that the phrase \u2018fake news\u2019 has been used to describe any story that is in the media that a certain section of society don\u2019t like. A poll that shows a political leader is unpopular is branded \u2018fake news\u2019 regardless of the facts.<\/p>\n<h2>Transfer Stories<\/h2>\n<p>So how is football linked to the idea of fake news, you may well be asking. It\u2019s a fair question and we\u2019ll start in the most obvious place of all &#8211; transfer rumours. Football fans are desperate for their club to be involved in the chase for the signatures of the best players around. Whether you support Liverpool, Manchester United, Everton or West Ham, you want to believe that the rumours in the newspapers about your club being linked with X, Y or Z player are true. Few football fans actually realise the huge number of variables involved in a transfer rumour, so they are happy to fall hook, line and sinker for any story appearing in a newspaper or online about their club \u2018putting in a bid\u2019 for a given player.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-conversation=\"none\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">&#x1f50d; SCOUT REPORT | Liverpool midfield target Naby Keita has been putting in some impressive performances for RB Leipzig in the Bundesliga <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/LFC?src=hash\">#LFC<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/qCWZTc0cvf\">pic.twitter.com\/qCWZTc0cvf<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; LFC Transfer Room (@LFCTransferRoom) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/LFCTransferRoom\/status\/836982206941827072\">March 1, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>A quick search of the phrase \u2018Transfer Rumours\u2019 on Twitter will bring up hundreds of accounts with thousands of Tweets, all purporting to know what players various clubs are thinking of signing. If you know even the slightest thing about football and the transfer rumour mill then the phrase \u2018ITK\u2019 will be familiar to you. If you\u2019ve never heard it before then I\u2019ll explain; it stands for \u2018In The Know\u2019 and is shorthand for someone who claims that they have inside information at a football club. Perhaps they cut J\u00fcrgen Klopp\u2019s wife\u2019s hair or their brother is Ronald Koeman\u2019s gardener. The link is always extremely tenuous, but such is the desperation of football fans to believe what they\u2019ve got to say that that sort of thing is ignored in favour of an unlikely transfer story suddenly being true.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_319\" style=\"width: 543px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-319\" class=\"size-large wp-image-319\" src=\"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/P1000422-533x400.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"533\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/P1000422-533x400.jpg 533w, https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/P1000422-267x200.jpg 267w, https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/P1000422-65x50.jpg 65w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 533px) 100vw, 533px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-319\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Klopp<\/p><\/div>\n<p>When a transfer story rumour hits the newspaper of social media there is almost always a reason for it and it\u2019s very rarely that it\u2019s 100% true and accurate. Perhaps the player rumoured to be moving clubs is trying to convinced his current side to offer him a new contract, so their agent leaks something to the press to force the manager\u2019s hand. Perhaps the club rumoured to be signing said player is also locked in contract negotiations with one of their own players who plays in the same position and they\u2019re hoping that a rumour of a new signing to threaten his starting place will make him bring his wage demands down. More often than not the newspaper that started the rumour is just trying to fill column inches. They know Liverpool need a new left-back so they publish a story saying the Reds are about to sign one. Done.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-partner=\"tweetdeck\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Liverpool Handed Transfer Boost as Napoli Star&#8217;s Contract Talks Stall <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/LFC?src=hash\">#LFC<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/aPDmEGRIOv\">https:\/\/t.co\/aPDmEGRIOv<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/j9BEslUQiJ\">pic.twitter.com\/j9BEslUQiJ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 LFC Report (@LFC_Fanly) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/LFC_Fanly\/status\/837281533182504960\">March 2, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\u201cutf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>When you stop and think logically about it there\u2019s no reason on earth why a football club would tell everybody who they\u2019re trying to sign. It doesn\u2019t make any sense from a business point of view to let your rivals know who you\u2019re thinking of going after. Even if you did want to information to reach the public then you\u2019d turn to a journalist you trust, not the bloke who trims your hedges in the hope that he\u2019s on Twitter. Back in 2005 Everton were looking to sign Momo Sissoko and David Moyes told the press about it. Rumour has it that Rafa Benitez wanted him but didn\u2019t know he was for sale until he read Moyes\u2019 comments so the Reds swooped in and beat their neighbours to his signature. If you want to get a rough idea of where the notion of \u2018fake news\u2019 came from then you\u2019d do well to explore the rumour mill of football transfer stories.<\/p>\n<h2>Helping Out Mates<\/h2>\n<p>Manchester United have been on a good run of form over the last couple of months. Since the start of November they\u2019ve lost just two matches in all competitions. As we headed into our game against Leicester City on Monday we had a chance to put ourselves four points clear of the Red Devils, though they\u2019d have a game in hand on us. What Jos\u00e9 Mourinho could have done with was a story making it into the press that might have unsettled our players. Thankfully for the Portuguese manager he has a friend who is a journalist who is more than happy to print any nonsense story if it will do his mate a favour or cause one of his rivals a problem.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-partner=\"tweetdeck\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Liverpool players &#8216;depressed&#8217; by Jurgen Klopp&#8217;s training method. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/LFC?src=hash\">#LFC<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/15oKE9aS42\">https:\/\/t.co\/15oKE9aS42<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/yVdEnrE9nX\">pic.twitter.com\/yVdEnrE9nX<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Duncan Castles (@DuncanCastles) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DuncanCastles\/status\/836180690223923201\">February 27, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\u201cutf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Low and behold on Monday afternoon the Daily Record prints a story written by one Duncan Castles that suggests that Liverpool players are \u2018depressed\u2019 by having to train at night under J\u00fcrgen Klopp. The majority of the article was little more than a hatchet job on a manager who won two Bundesliga titles with Borussia Dortmund, despite being up against the financial behemoth that is Bayern Munich. Then towards the end of the article comes a quote from an anonymous source who suggests that \u201cThe lads are depressed with [training at night]\u201d. This in spite of the fact that training at the same time as the match you\u2019ll be playing next is quite a common practice within football.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_546\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-546\" class=\"size-large wp-image-546\" src=\"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Manager-Jose-Mourinho_EUO_Rnoid-shutterstock-600x400.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Manager-Jose-Mourinho_EUO_Rnoid-shutterstock-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Manager-Jose-Mourinho_EUO_Rnoid-shutterstock-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Manager-Jose-Mourinho_EUO_Rnoid-shutterstock-768x511.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Manager-Jose-Mourinho_EUO_Rnoid-shutterstock.jpg 1000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-546\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rnoid \/ shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Castles\u2019 source may as well have been from a Manchester United fan club, such is the uselessness of it from a validity point of view. The entire article was designed to do nothing more than unsettle the Reds ahead of a big match and it won\u2019t be surprising if we see more such articles coming out from Castles in the remaining couple of months before the season ends. Of course Mourinho himself is the master of such distraction tactics. Whether he\u2019s managing Chelsea, Barcelona or Manchester United, if his team does poorly then you can bet your bottom dollar that the \u2018Special One\u2019 will say something outrageous to distract from the fact that his team has under-performed. See his \u2018We didn\u2019t lose\u2019 response to when his side lost to Hull in the League Cup semi-final second-leg.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-partner=\"tweetdeck\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">&#8216;A Roy Hodgson Leicester side would play like last year&#8217;s title winning team.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Danny Murphy on his former boss.<\/p>\n<p>The right man for <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/LCFC?src=hash\">#LCFC<\/a>? <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/PYn0BbPHi1\">pic.twitter.com\/PYn0BbPHi1<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 BBC 5 live Sport (@5liveSport) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/5liveSport\/status\/837061401231429632\">March 1, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\u201cutf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Mourinho isn\u2019t the only one to use friends or ex-colleagues to spread stories on his behalf. Liverpool fans will have been amused to see one of Roy Hodgson\u2019s ex-players, Danny Murphy, suggest that the owl-faced moron would be a good manager for Leicester City. In fact, Murphy not only said that he\u2019d be good for the foxes but even went as far as to say that he would be able to get them back to their title winning ways. In terms of \u2018fake news\u2019 this really is right up there. Across his entire career Roy Hodgson has completely and utterly failed to do win anything noteworthy with a top side, despite managing at Inter Milan (twice), Liverpool and England.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_213\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-213\" class=\"size-large wp-image-213\" src=\"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Roy-Hodgson_EUO_Vlad1988-shutterstock-600x400.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Roy-Hodgson_EUO_Vlad1988-shutterstock-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Roy-Hodgson_EUO_Vlad1988-shutterstock-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Roy-Hodgson_EUO_Vlad1988-shutterstock.jpg 1000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-213\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Vlad1988 \/ shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Hodgson\u2019s supporters might point to his title winning experience with Halmstads BK, Malm\u00f6 FF or Copenhagen, but even if we ignore how weak the Allsvenskan and Danish Superliga are there\u2019s still something else that poo-poos the notion that he deserves huge credit for those experiences. The team that\u2019s won the most Allsvenskan titles across its history is Malm\u00f6 FF, whilst the record holders for the Danish Superliga are Copenhagen. Hardly setting the world alight. His career win ratio of 43.61 might be enough to keep Leicester in the league and even see them rise to respectable mid-table, but to suggest that he\u2019s can get them back to their title winning ways is just plain wrong.<\/p>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>Where you\u2019re looking at transfer rumours and where they come from, members of the press and ex-pundits helping out their mates or stats that are used to paint a picture that is disingenuous at best, there\u2019s a real basis for believing that football was doing \u2018fake news\u2019 long before any politician started to talk about. The major difference is, of course, that in football it really is quite often just entirely made up, whilst in politics is nothing more than a distraction technique to make people question things they don\u2019t want to agree with in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>Or is all this just fake news? Who knows what\u2019s what any more\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This isn\u2019t a political blog. Though I have never tried to make a secret of my political leanings within my writing, this isn&#8217;t a place for going off on one about things that are happening around the world. First and foremost it is a blog about Liverpool Football Club, with occasional references to non LFC matters should something catch my attention. I say all of that because I want to make clear from the outset that this piece isn\u2019t intended to be a political commentary. It\u2019s just that some things have happened this week that made me think about the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":839,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions\/839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}