Dream Football League Qatar 2015

guignol · Mar 18, 2013

guignol said: ↑

if you take the time to follow the tweet trail and do a bit of digging you will see where mr. kay went oh so wrong. i will do so for you when i have a bit more time.
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and i have a little now.

i'll start by giving what is almost certainly your source for what you quoted in gray :

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/olive...h-website-was-source-his-qutar-football-super

one of the things you elided by not giving the link was the comments from readers who are themselves rather knowledgeable as it is a site much frequented by journalists.

another is the link to a follow-up story about Times sports editor tony evans, in a full column, admitting with one hand that kay's story was false... while defending him (and themselves) with the other, all the while offering no apology to the cahiers which kay had both ridiculed and accused of dishonesty on social networks. we note that kay has not been on the radar anywhere since last wednesday.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/times...e-story-was-false-and-based-unreliable-source

the whole column is of the most unconvincing and wishy-washy sort of rationalization. but the pearl in that grotty oyster is :

After the event, it is easy to look into the background of an individual and proclaim that minimal research would have unmasked an unreliable source.
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after the event? it is that kay's main and probably only source was one rob beal; the most uproariously laughable part of all this is that kay, a professional and certainly very well-paid journalist, was following and taking at face value the twits of a man he wanted to believe was the powerful head of a parisian media consultancy (even though dozens of people in, or even only peripherally related to the industry, had known him for years to be a mythomaniacal huckster who lives with his mother and runs scams by phone out of a sheffield pub between pints of lager paid for by her majesty's department of work and pensions) and turned them into a three page article in the good grey times of london without the slightest hesitation or corroboration.

it's a mistake anyone could make.

that is anyone with the right combination of hubris, gullibility and good old-fashioned bone-laziness.

further reading:
http://www.cahiersdufootball.net/article.php?id=4817
http://blogs.thescore.com/counterattack/2013/03/13/new-twist-in-the-timesdfl-story/#comment-46208
http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/news/...pes-elite-compete-dream-league-082126288.html

guignol · Mar 20, 2013

i translated what is probably the last CdF article directly about this fiasco... although the subject of the slippery slope big-name mainstream journalism is on remains open!

The Dream Football League has been cancelled
The Times has finally admitted in this morning’s edition that they had gone astray last Wednesday when they published an entire dossier on the "Dream Football League", 24 hours after a dispatch from the Cahiers du foot’s Agence Transe Presse "announcing" the creation of the competition: the name, a great many of its characteristics and even the image we had put online were inexplicably found reprinted in the British daily, which had great difficulty in accepting the evidence that something had gone wrong; they first stood by their story, without aword of explanation concerning the more than resemblancewith our dispatch, even continuing to use the name "Dream Football League" in articles published the next day. Neither did they make any effort to contact us.
In the defense of Oliver Kay by his coworkers and colleagues, who insinuated that we were behind the accusations, we detected no small condescension. "Obscure french website", "satirical", "spoof site": all these were used to describe our website. To be expected considering the differencebetween us in terms of size, history and prestige. The agitation on the web, moreover, came from small fry in and around the journalistic community not from reputed journalists. But the prestige of the Times in no way dispenses them from offering an explanation of facts as embarrassing as those they were called to account for. [1]
Nothing about Robert
Does today’s article set things right ? In reading the article by Tony Evans, chief football editor, if the contrition is real, the reader is not informed of the nature and conditions of the error committed. We’ll leave aside the absence of any mention of the Cahiers, which is secondary. But nothing about the circumstances surrounding the fiasco nor about the central figure of the story, who happens to be quite a character: Rob Beal, the source who took the paper for a ride (lire "Beal, le roman d'un tricheur"), and who practically denounced himself the very night the brouhaha started (lire "Times New roman")... but there resides the great weakness of the Times in this affair.
Evans describes an informer who had given signs of trustworthiness, perhaps seeking to minimize the Times fault. In fact, the person in question was very widely known, both in France and in England, Angleterre, as a pathological liar and notorious con man. He had indeed served as a source for several major media players, and communicated with them in various ways, especially via numerous conversations on twitter peppered with invitations to carry on through other channels. But he has long been clearly identified throughout the profession as a doubtful source, and if he occasionally, if only by chance, been proved right, everything tends to discredit him: the discretion of an elephant parachuted onto the stage of the Bolshoi, his behavior (capable of violent threats when provoked), his often absolutely unbelievable claims, his invisibility… Oliver Kay admitted on his facebook page l'a admis sur sa page Facebook: "Key aspects of the story were based on the word of someone whose credibility I severely overestimated ".

Hook, Line and Sinker
Another question: what got into Beal to make him try such a foolish and risky operation that led to his downfall ? The information we’ve obtained at least show how he did it: particularly, that he didn’t just target the Times, but that he had showered information on his contacts all day Tuesday. For example, a journalist for a major French paper got an e-mail at 11am – the very day of our ATP dispatch - entitled "Qatar League 2015" and containing ... our graphic for the Dream Football League. Just a teaser. An unimpeachable source assures us that a high-up at the BBC had received a similar message the ame day. The French journalist, after a quick research on internet, identified where the Dream Football League came from and turned down Beal… who in response insisted that the basis of the story was still true. Approached in the same manner, Oliver Kay took the bait.

When suspicion of a hoax started growing, Beal, ever discrete, twitted his support, even getting some retweets from journalists at the Times and other British media. Did Beal, mythomaniac et inveterate punter, bet everything on the veracity of the project, believing in turn in the existence of the "other sources" mentioned by Kay?
Le tour DFL
Which other sources precisely? This article from the Independent, showing considerable circumspection, compared on Saturday the information from the ATP "dispatch" with Kay’s text : the "original" elements in the latter are limited to a few odds and ends. As admitted by Tony Evans, they took the fact that no one vociferously denied the existence of the DFL was considered as validation of their story. Richard Whittall, bloguger on thescore.com based in Toronto, to whose remarkable work the present article owes much, got conformation that no club except Manchester United had been contacted by the Times, and none before March 11. Thus, far from being the fruit of a long investigation that the paper assured us of, it seems the Times’ fiasco resulted from a combination of excess hurry, a grave lack of verification and the desire to believe the unbelievable as soon as Qatar is involved. This episode also points out the morass of sources in football journalism, and the supplementary murkiness created by social networks, a breeding ground for imposters. Inversely, it has also shown that Twitter can federate independant parties of good will and provide a useful terrain of counter-enquiry. In the end, that the trickery was confounded constitutes in itself something positive, even if it took some stubborness to manage it.

[1] Nor permit invoking the argument of authority to negate automatically the possibility of error on the part of Oliver Kay by simply isisting on his ecellent reputation. a journalist is not infallible simply because he's good
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