Chelsea fans duped into talking about fictitious players need to know it's OK to admit your handle on the Dutch league is shaky
You may have seen it by now, the video that started doing the rounds at the end of last week and, alongside a chorus of chuckles and belly laughs, has made stars of Liam Ying, Win Nowt, Win Ding Youup, Deanio and the tall Finnish goalkeeper, Lugi Bell.
Put together by Full Time Devils, a Manchester United supporters' YouTube channel, in collaboration with Talksport, the 6min 41sec clip sees comedian Andrew Ryan approach fans outside Stamford Bridge and ask them their views on players who have been linked with a move to Chelsea. The thing is, all the supposed targets are made up – Liam Ying, a talented left-back from Crewe, is nothing more than an anagram of 'I am Lying' while the jokes behind Dutch full-back Win Nowt and South Korean prospect Win Ding Youup are pretty obvious. Deanio, meanwhile, a Brazilian Under-21 midfielder who plays for Parma, is another way of saying 'No Idea'. And Lugi Bell? 'Gullible', of course.
What's remarkable is that the majority of Chelsea fans featured claim to have heard of the players and, in some cases, to have even seen them play. Ying is apparently "quick" and in possession of a "good left leg", Nowt is "imposing", Deanio has great "eye-sight of the field" while Bell, all 6ft 4in of him, "positions himself very well". It is isn't until the end of the video, and after he approaches a group of three fans outside Fulham Broadway underground station, that Ryan is rumbled as a bringer of nonsense news.
Naturally much humour has been derided from the prank, one which Neil Smythe, a senior producer with Full Time Devils, says has less to do with football and more to do with men's "inability to admit they don't know or can't do something". Yet watching it there is a sense that what we have here is a symptom of a growing, very modern trend rooted in the sport; the desire to appear totally clued-up on players, teams and tactics across Europe and beyond even if, quite frankly, you don't know your Deanio from your Draxler.
The recently-coined phrase used to characterise such people is a divisive one. For some, "football hipster" is the perfect way to describe someone who has as much interest in Groningen v FC Zwolle in the Eredivisie as they do Arsenal v Tottenham in the Premier League (the Chelsea fan who described Win Nowt as "imposing" also claimed to follow Dutch football), while others see it as a condescending insult, or as the Guardian's Spanish football correspondent Sid Lowe puts it: "A bitter attack from people who seem to think it's somehow wrong to have an interest other than theirs. I get it because of the Spanish's football thing, as if Madrid and Barcelona are somehow fucking left field."
There is nothing wrong with a thirst for knowledge and among some fans that desire has always existed and has only been enhanced by football's globalisation and the explosion in access to a greater a number of players and clubs from a wider range of countries and continents. Via enhanced broadcasting and the scope the internet – in particular social media – gives to people to view and share reports, blogs, and videos, it is almost as easy to stay in touch with Klaas-Jan Huntelaar's form at Schalke from a three-bed semi in Grimsby as it is from a studio apartment in the centre of Gelsenkirchen.
"When I started getting into football as a kid, it was during the period in which English clubs were banned from Europe, so it was like a window into a different, clandestine, untapped football," reflects the freelance European football writer Andy Brassell. "Catching five minutes of Real Madrid or even Gornik Zabrze on Sportsnight seemed incredible exotic. I used to get the atlas out and look them up. It's obviously different today. We have such incredible choice of football to watch. Accordingly, people are a lot more knowledgeable about the European game."
Or not, as the Full Time Devils clip shows. In their defence, the duped Chelsea fans are unlikely to be alone in having claimed to have heard of and seen players that do not exist, and rather than mock perhaps this should be the point when someone says: "Honestly, it's OK to admit you don't know huge amounts about European and world football." Better that then make up stuff.
I for one am happy to admit to a less-than-extensive knowledge of such fields. Don't get me wrong, there is a long-established interest in football from beyond these shores, ever since I became enthralled by Italia '90 as a nine-year-old. The appetite was truly whetted two years later following the introduction of Serie A coverage on Channel Four, hardly a surprise when your weekends are suddenly lit-up by Gianluca Vialli, Dejan Savicevic and Giuseppe Signori with James Richardson sitting behind a giant ice cream in the centre of Rome, holding up a copy of Gazzetta dello Sport and telling you that Internazionale are about to sign Ronaldo for a world record fee of £19.5m (or Stewart Downing in today's money).
The standard teenage obsession with Championship Manager further stoked the interest but even then there was no great desire to cram my head with information regarding players and clubs from across Europe and beyond. My focus was far more on domestic football and, in particular, learning about and watching as much as possible of Liverpool, the club I have supported since the age of eight. It largely remains the case today in spite of viewing games from not just Serie A but also La Liga, Ligue 1, the Bundesliga and the Champions League on a regular basis. The interest is sizeable, the knowledge is decent but the desire for an expert grasp is simply not there.
As such, it takes a rare exception such as Schalke's Kyriakos Papadopoulos to provoke me into finding out to any great detail about the next hot thing from abroad. YouTube highlights packages are avoided at all costs (it is possible to make any dud from any country look good with a well-edited montage) and instead the preference is to come across them in a live match, either on TV or in the flesh. In the pre-Twitter-buzz days that was the norm and often led to a glorious element of surprise. I knew nothing about Tony Yeboah before he moved from Eintracht Frankfurt to Leeds United in January 1995 and not much more until he scored that goal against Liverpool five months later. It was an out-of-the-blue, breathtaking moment and you wonder if the impact would have been less so if Yeboah's arrival at Elland Road had been preceded by a wealth of clips and blogs, via Twitter and elsewhere, testifying to his ability to thunder a volley in from distance.
There are those who crave such details and for them this is a golden age – instant access to backstories and statistics means fans can know about an overseas player to a greater degree than the club interested in signing him. But, as Lowe adds, "people shouldn't feel that they have to know everything," and for those with a lack of desire or time to become football aficionados there is still plenty to take from the beautiful game, and certainly no need to give a man with a microphone your assessment of a Finnish goalkeeper who doesn't even exist. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
You may have seen it by now, the video that started doing the rounds at the end of last week and, alongside a chorus of chuckles and belly laughs, has made stars of Liam Ying, Win Nowt, Win Ding Youup, Deanio and the tall Finnish goalkeeper, Lugi Bell.
Put together by Full Time Devils, a Manchester United supporters' YouTube channel, in collaboration with Talksport, the 6min 41sec clip sees comedian Andrew Ryan approach fans outside Stamford Bridge and ask them their views on players who have been linked with a move to Chelsea. The thing is, all the supposed targets are made up – Liam Ying, a talented left-back from Crewe, is nothing more than an anagram of 'I am Lying' while the jokes behind Dutch full-back Win Nowt and South Korean prospect Win Ding Youup are pretty obvious. Deanio, meanwhile, a Brazilian Under-21 midfielder who plays for Parma, is another way of saying 'No Idea'. And Lugi Bell? 'Gullible', of course.
What's remarkable is that the majority of Chelsea fans featured claim to have heard of the players and, in some cases, to have even seen them play. Ying is apparently "quick" and in possession of a "good left leg", Nowt is "imposing", Deanio has great "eye-sight of the field" while Bell, all 6ft 4in of him, "positions himself very well". It is isn't until the end of the video, and after he approaches a group of three fans outside Fulham Broadway underground station, that Ryan is rumbled as a bringer of nonsense news.
Naturally much humour has been derided from the prank, one which Neil Smythe, a senior producer with Full Time Devils, says has less to do with football and more to do with men's "inability to admit they don't know or can't do something". Yet watching it there is a sense that what we have here is a symptom of a growing, very modern trend rooted in the sport; the desire to appear totally clued-up on players, teams and tactics across Europe and beyond even if, quite frankly, you don't know your Deanio from your Draxler.
The recently-coined phrase used to characterise such people is a divisive one. For some, "football hipster" is the perfect way to describe someone who has as much interest in Groningen v FC Zwolle in the Eredivisie as they do Arsenal v Tottenham in the Premier League (the Chelsea fan who described Win Nowt as "imposing" also claimed to follow Dutch football), while others see it as a condescending insult, or as the Guardian's Spanish football correspondent Sid Lowe puts it: "A bitter attack from people who seem to think it's somehow wrong to have an interest other than theirs. I get it because of the Spanish's football thing, as if Madrid and Barcelona are somehow fucking left field."
There is nothing wrong with a thirst for knowledge and among some fans that desire has always existed and has only been enhanced by football's globalisation and the explosion in access to a greater a number of players and clubs from a wider range of countries and continents. Via enhanced broadcasting and the scope the internet – in particular social media – gives to people to view and share reports, blogs, and videos, it is almost as easy to stay in touch with Klaas-Jan Huntelaar's form at Schalke from a three-bed semi in Grimsby as it is from a studio apartment in the centre of Gelsenkirchen.
"When I started getting into football as a kid, it was during the period in which English clubs were banned from Europe, so it was like a window into a different, clandestine, untapped football," reflects the freelance European football writer Andy Brassell. "Catching five minutes of Real Madrid or even Gornik Zabrze on Sportsnight seemed incredible exotic. I used to get the atlas out and look them up. It's obviously different today. We have such incredible choice of football to watch. Accordingly, people are a lot more knowledgeable about the European game."
Or not, as the Full Time Devils clip shows. In their defence, the duped Chelsea fans are unlikely to be alone in having claimed to have heard of and seen players that do not exist, and rather than mock perhaps this should be the point when someone says: "Honestly, it's OK to admit you don't know huge amounts about European and world football." Better that then make up stuff.
I for one am happy to admit to a less-than-extensive knowledge of such fields. Don't get me wrong, there is a long-established interest in football from beyond these shores, ever since I became enthralled by Italia '90 as a nine-year-old. The appetite was truly whetted two years later following the introduction of Serie A coverage on Channel Four, hardly a surprise when your weekends are suddenly lit-up by Gianluca Vialli, Dejan Savicevic and Giuseppe Signori with James Richardson sitting behind a giant ice cream in the centre of Rome, holding up a copy of Gazzetta dello Sport and telling you that Internazionale are about to sign Ronaldo for a world record fee of £19.5m (or Stewart Downing in today's money).
The standard teenage obsession with Championship Manager further stoked the interest but even then there was no great desire to cram my head with information regarding players and clubs from across Europe and beyond. My focus was far more on domestic football and, in particular, learning about and watching as much as possible of Liverpool, the club I have supported since the age of eight. It largely remains the case today in spite of viewing games from not just Serie A but also La Liga, Ligue 1, the Bundesliga and the Champions League on a regular basis. The interest is sizeable, the knowledge is decent but the desire for an expert grasp is simply not there.
As such, it takes a rare exception such as Schalke's Kyriakos Papadopoulos to provoke me into finding out to any great detail about the next hot thing from abroad. YouTube highlights packages are avoided at all costs (it is possible to make any dud from any country look good with a well-edited montage) and instead the preference is to come across them in a live match, either on TV or in the flesh. In the pre-Twitter-buzz days that was the norm and often led to a glorious element of surprise. I knew nothing about Tony Yeboah before he moved from Eintracht Frankfurt to Leeds United in January 1995 and not much more until he scored that goal against Liverpool five months later. It was an out-of-the-blue, breathtaking moment and you wonder if the impact would have been less so if Yeboah's arrival at Elland Road had been preceded by a wealth of clips and blogs, via Twitter and elsewhere, testifying to his ability to thunder a volley in from distance.
There are those who crave such details and for them this is a golden age – instant access to backstories and statistics means fans can know about an overseas player to a greater degree than the club interested in signing him. But, as Lowe adds, "people shouldn't feel that they have to know everything," and for those with a lack of desire or time to become football aficionados there is still plenty to take from the beautiful game, and certainly no need to give a man with a microphone your assessment of a Finnish goalkeeper who doesn't even exist. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.