#Picturesque fake fiction professional#

The Confederations Cup had finished, and so had the European under-21 championships. One day this month, the independent soccer website Football365, which had its launch in 1997, received more unique visits than on any other day in its history. Looking back now, he regards Bugduv as “the first post-truth footballer.” Perfect Conditions He had demonstrated, though, that soccer was the perfect environment for fake news to thrive. “It was not meant to be malicious,” Varley said. His phantom had traveled all the way into respected mainstream publications, even making one list of the top 50 young players in Europe (placing 30th). But by then, Varley felt his point had been proved. “And there is a desire to be seen as though you are in the know, not to want to admit you aren’t on top of the game.”Įventually, of course, the hoax was exposed. “People will believe what they want to believe,” Varley said. He created a fictional Moldovan newspaper, titled with a vulgar Irish word play, and assigned Bugduv a caricature of an agent. Each post was written in the style of The Associated Press: stripped of rhetorical flourish, straightforward, just the simple facts. Varley first spread the word about Bugduv on various message boards. At his invented Moldovan team, Bugduv would play a supporting role, initially, rather than scoring buckets of goals every game. He based Bugduv’s characteristics on Wayne Rooney - “strong, so he could fit into a team straightaway” - but he did not “make him a superhero.” Realism, he realized, was key.

#Picturesque fake fiction professional#

It was for this reason that, in 2008, Varley built his hoax slowly, carefully, using all of his professional expertise. The truth you accepted depended largely on which one suited you best. Sources at Chelsea, another of the forward’s suitors, insisted the club still retained hope of completing a deal with Lukaku.

This month, in the space of a single day, unidentified sources close to Manchester United confirmed to reporters that the club had agreed to pay Everton 75 million pounds (nearly $97 million) for the star striker Romelu Lukaku. It is a phenomenon soccer has exploited for some time. It is a story designed to take root in an explicitly partisan environment: Whether it is true or not does not matter so much as whether its intended audience wants it to be true. To most, though, it signifies a story where the facts are so disputed or distorted that truth itself becomes fluid. The phrase has been used so often, an argument can be made that because it means almost everything, it no longer means anything at all. (When Arsenal’s Mesut Özil had his Instagram account hacked this month, he pleaded with people to stop spreading “ fake news.”) Sports stars and celebrities increasingly reach for it as a defense mechanism. Politicians across the world use it as a pithy put-down to dismiss any accusation they find uncomfortable. Now, Trump tweets and speaks about “fake news” relentlessly, often whenever he reads or sees something he does not like. 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.” His player would be a phonetic rendering of Ó Conaire’s title: Masal Bugduv. “So there is a correlation with the transfer market.” After all, the plot of his short story centers on a character who “knows his donkey is useless, but tries to sell it to the highest bidder,” Varley said. And his name would come straight from the statue of Ó Conaire. He would be a promising 16-year-old from Moldova, a country distant enough that his fictional roots might not easily be exposed. So in the summer of 2008, he invented a player.

“Based on sand.” Only a handful of the reported moves ever came to pass. “It was all Messi to Arsenal, that sort of thing,” he said. During the two months of the transfer window, he would spend hours sifting through articles laced with anonymous sources and stripped of verification, all purporting to reveal the identity of Arsenal’s next big signing. A few years ago, Varley, long since accustomed to spending his summers “grasping at every little snippet” of transfer speculation about his team, was scouring the internet for whispers as to which player Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger, would bring to the club.Īs a journalist - Varley is now group editor at The Galway Advertiser - he found the entire experience frustrating. Though he lives on Ireland’s picturesque, windswept west coast, Varley describes himself as an “avid” fan of Arsenal Football Club in London. Among his most noted works is the short story “M’asal Beag Dubh,” or “My Little Black Donkey.” It was that story which gave Varley his idea. He is regarded as the first great fiction writer in the Irish language.

Down the road from Declan Varley’s office in Galway, Ireland, is a statue of Pádraic Ó Conaire, a prolific Irish essayist and author.