Soccer is Fake News!

Fake news is something that has been very prominent during the most recent presidential election, however I have been exposed to it for almost as long as I can remember.  Soccer transfer rumors are the best example of fake news I can think of.  Their goal is to get people to click on the article, and there are many that are so unbelievable that people get pulled into the stories.  The “Pizza, politics and pure fiction” article we read earlier this week mentioned that one of the goals of fake news is ” hoping to maximise clicks on their link or site to secure advertising dollars.”  Soccer transfer rumors do this every winter and summer when the transfer window is open.  This means teams are allowed to buy players from other teams, and it means endless stories of player being linked to another team, no matter how ridiculous they may seem.

Example of a player responding to a false transfer rumor on Twitter.

An article from the New York Times titled, “The Original Fake News: Soccer Transfers”, talks about how soccer transfers have always generated fake news.  It even mentions that “Long before the ascension of President Trump made the phrase unavoidable, soccer provided the most fertile ground imaginable for what we have come to call “fake news.”  Fake transfer rumors are just as much a feature of soccer than any other aspect of the sport these days.  Before social media was a huge thing, many newspapers and sports news sites would have headlines of a big name player linked with a team to sell papers.  Nowadays, especially through Twitter, there are accounts and websites that have many so called ‘inside sources’ that supply them with rumors.  Twitter also makes it easy for stories to spread as people will see a rumor and retweet it causing more and more people to see it.  Some of the rumors are so outrageous that it’s hard to believe people would fall for them.  A video by Dream Team parodies the creation of transfer rumors, the scary thing is that almost every ridiculous rumor in the video was made by a real news source.

The problem is, with social media becoming a main news source for many people, fake news will only continue to spread.  Is there any way to prevent or slow down the epidemic of fake news?