Football’s Top Non-Existent Rising Stars

If you want a good example of how unsubstantiated rumors on the internet can snowball and gain legitimacy, Slate ‘s Brian Phillips tells the story of Masal Bugduv, a fictional soccer player from Moldova, who was able to capture headlines in some of Britain’s most respected publications:

Earlier this month, the Times ran a feature called “Football’s Top 50 Rising Stars,” which featured at No. 30 a 16-year-old attacker named Masal Bugduv, whom the paper, never one to fear irony, described as “Moldova’s finest.” A bright future seemed to fill Bugduv’s windscreen. The young player had been “strongly linked,” the Times said, with a transfer to the London club Arsenal, had already earned a mention on the popular soccer news site Goal.com , spawned excitement in online forums, and been portrayed as something of a savior by the magazine When Saturday Comes , which introduced him as “one bright spot” amid Moldova’s nationalist strife.

But as the old scout’s adage says, even the most talented young striker will struggle if he has no corporeal being. Blogger Neil McDonnell, who writes about sports under the name Fredorrarci, suspected something might be amiss after picking up a hint from a Russian blog commenter about a “fanny misteak” in the Times feature—the spelling presumably the result of complex transliteration from the Cyrillic for “dude, what?” After a bit of rifling through Wikipedia history pages and an exchange of e-mails with the editor of Soviet Sport magazine, McDonnell discovered that not only was there no such player as Masal Bugduv, Masal Bugduv wasn’t even a Moldovan name . . . .

The hoaxer, it seemed, had exploited the trickle-up nature of online information flow. The blog comments fooled the blogs, the blogs fooled the news sites, and the news sites fooled the magazines. When the Times came to Bugduv, his story was resting on a pedestal of widespread acceptance. In the end, the hoax laid bare what we had all dimly suspected: Sometimes, sportswriters do not know what they are talking about.