Very Specific Football Question No.50: How can we ever trust a footballer’s tweets again?

“Great game last night, good performance from all. Bring on United! @WestHamUtd @EFLCup”

The seemingly innocent words of West Ham United’s Michail Antonio following this week’s thrilling league cup victory against Chelsea.

Two crossed Hammer emojis, 183 retweets, 1.3k likes - job done. The Irons winger was feeling good about life and he wanted to share it with the world.

Meanwhile, the beaten Blues players were more philosophical.

As goalkeeper Asmir Begovic summarised, “Tough result for us tonight. We will pick ourselves up and keep going. Lots still to play for this season! Great support by our fans!”

Three emojis. 111 retweets, 338 likes. The numbers aren’t great, but it’s a defiant message nonetheless. Lovely stuff.

Or is it?

A Twitter faux-pas from Sunderland’s Victor Anichebe last weekend has cast doubt on anything any footballer has ever said, or ever will say, on social media.

The striker’s tweet is already the stuff of 2016/17 Premier League legend after he unwittingly prefaced a bog standard “We go again” post following a defeat at West Ham (that he didn’t even play in) with the words, “Can you tweet something like”.

The hasty deletion of the post confirmed what most had suspected – that Anichebe’s tweet didn’t signal a new and exciting post-modern social media strategy rich in irony and intertextualisation, but rather that he had posted an instruction from some Sunderland PR monkey by mistake.

But it’s a mistake that could have dramatic repercussions far beyond this one seemingly unremarkable event, much in the same way that unremarkable Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman once single-handedly revolutionised the transfer market.

Anichebe’s salad days are probably behind him – he can’t even get in Sunderland’s team – but he may have changed the face of modern football with that tweet. He is the Bosman of social media.

Let’s look at those tweets from the West Ham v Chelsea game again.

Antonio: “Great game last night, good performance from all. Bring on United! @WestHamUtd @EFLCup”

The most eye-catching element is not the content – which is incredibly boring – but the grammar. Full stops, capital letters, exclamation marks all utilised to perfection.

Impressive stuff from a footballer, especially one who recently revealed he was brought up amid gang violence on the rough streets of south London. (Having said that, he did screw up his hashtags.)

And what about Begovic?

“Tough result for us tonight. We will pick ourselves up and keep going. Lots still to play for this season! Great support by our fans!”

Again, exemplary syntax from the Bosnian shotstopper. And would those be the same fans that were lobbing seats at their Hammers counterparts during the game?

It’s perfectly plausible that Antonio is an excellent speller and Begovic is keen to defend the Chelsea Headhunters, but the problem is that Anichebe has made us question the authenticity of everything.

How do we know that Saido Berahino really “had a great time at the Boldmere St FC soccer camp” on Thursday?

Was Hector Bellerin’s genuinely excellent post detailing how his free-kick technique compares unfavourably with a that of a ginger cat actually penned by one of his team of comedy writers?

Even Twitter God Joey Barton’s post last weekend that he is “strangely getting drawn to Strictly…” could be seen a cynical ploy by his agent to put the feelers out for a future showbiz career in case he gets sacked by Rangers.

We just don’t know anymore.

Most footballers probably won’t care about this, especially if they’re only posting on social media because they’re being told to.

But it could be bad news for the social media giants. Is it any coincidence, for instance, that Twitter closed down its Vine video service within days of Anichebe exposing its dark underbelly?

Yes, it was almost certainly a coincidence. But Anichebe-gate might convince the digital bigwigs that it’s better to just let footballers post whatever they want on social media in future.

After all, they’re responsible adults, right?

Right?

Follow @darlingkevin on Twitter

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