Some snips from a very funny story in Slate by Brian Phillips: “Fictional Moldovan Soccer Phenom Tells All: Inside the ingenious hoax that fooled the British sports press.”
On a typical weekday, the English soccer press devotes itself to unsubstantiated rumors, manufactured scandals, and bikini pictures of players’ girlfriends (who seem to roam the earth together in a giant conjugal yacht, like the Beatles in Yellow Submarine). This week, however, thanks to an ingenious hoax that took in the Times of London, the soccer press has been engrossed by Moldova. Specifically by one Moldovan teenager, who is not, as it happens, a real person.
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.
And:
So, who was this clever hoaxer? Whoever engineered the prank left behind a calling card in the form of the fictional Moldovan newspaper Diario Mo Thon, described in one of the concocted AP stories as “the top sports daily in Balti.” Diario means diary in several Romance languages, and mo thón is Irish for my ass—just the kind of nested, polyglot ass pun that every good imaginary-Moldovan prank requires.
It got better. After SoccerLens blogger McDonnell broke the story, Bugduv fans in Ireland noticed that the player’s name was a phonetic twin for m’asal beag dubh, which is Irish for “my little black donkey.” A second Irish ass pun, sure. But “My Little Black Donkey” is also the name of an Irish-language short story by early 20th-century writer Pádraic Ó Conaire. And the story, about a man tricked into overpaying for a lazy donkey based on some vivid village gossip, can be read anachronistically as a parody of the culture of soccer transfers, in which the flaming rings of hype around a player—about how good he is, where he might go, how much a club might pay for him—often seem to overwhelm the minor matter of what he does on the pitch.
Thanks to A for the tip.