Soon after Manchester United had been embarrassed by City last week, intensifying the debate over Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s position as manager, United’s midfielder Bruno Fernandes posted a message on Twitter showing a group of men laughing uproariously.
‘Gooood vibes,’ it said. Presumably, the extra 0s were meant as a nod to the number of goals his team had scored that day.
And the number of goals they had scored against Liverpool in the previous home game. The Tweet was met with a mixture of incomprehension, ridicule and anger. And then it was deleted.
Manchester United don't seem to trust their players to be themselves on social media
CEO of media Phil Lynch has been criticised since he opened up on methods the club uses with players on social media
It turned out the picture was of five Arsenal players including Gabriel Martinelli and Mohamed Elneny and that it was intended for Martinelli’s Twitter feed, not Bruno’s.
A social media manager somewhere had made a mistake. That’s what happens when you try to blur the line between appearance and reality. That’s what happens when you appoint someone else to create an idealised, saccharine, dull, unbelievable version of you.
United have a CEO of media to deal with this kind of stuff. His name is Phil Lynch and it seems his job is to turn players into people he thinks we want them to be. Actually, we want them to be themselves but United don’t trust them to be themselves.
So they massage their image as lovingly and meticulously as if it were a piece of that premium grade meat you pay for in smart restaurants. And they throw in cynicism for the seasoning.
‘We pull, twice a day, fan sentiment graphs for every one of our players,’ said Lynch in an interview, instantly breaching the cardinal rule of PR that you must never become the story.
‘We have certain thresholds that alert us when we see fan sentiment going one way — be that a personal issue, an on-pitch performance issue — and when that happens, we then start to work with the player and his team individually to try and counter that narrative a little bit.’
Gary Neville slated the CEO of media saying that he's 'creating robots on and off the pitch'
So it turns out most player Twitter feeds are just the online version of a Porsche Cayenne with blacked out windows. Another barrier. Another thing to separate players and public. Another thing to keep the supporters out, not let them in. Another thing to buy them off. It is fake. It is a construct.
There are not many positive aspects of social media but the idea that it allows direct contact between player and fans is one of them. That has always been one of the reasons for its growth.
The kind of social engineering being pioneered by Lynch and his like destroys that in an instant. When you don’t believe what you are reading is written by the person who is supposed to have written it, why read it at all?
Gary Neville has been forthright about this image manipulation. He said it was ‘creating robots on and off the pitch’ and he was right. ‘Without your own identity, you are nothing,’ he said, and he was right.
A tweet meant for Gabriel Martinelli's account was published on Bruno Fernandes' social media page
United's social media strategy is distancing the gap between players and the public
‘What we have with footballers is them wanting to have their cake and eat it,’ he said, ‘proclaiming it to be authentic when it is their management team’s words.’
At a time when so many footballers — Raheem Sterling, Jordan Henderson, Marcus Rashford, Tyrone Mings, Troy Deeney and others — have emerged as genuine and powerful voices for social change, this attempt to use players as empty vessels for corporate blandspeak has felt particularly unfortunate and regressive.
Maybe the players who have fallen into this trap and allowed themselves to be manipulated should remember the message from the FA’s handling of England’s squad before and during the 2018 World Cup.
Gareth Southgate and an innovative, forward-thinking
