Yesterday had to be an ... interesting experience for beleaguered Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal. At about this hour, Twitter exploded with rumors that he had been fired and that the club had already brought in José Mourinho as his replacement. What started as a prank soon snowballed as the fake soccer insider industrial complex lept into action, inventing fake confirmatory info of their own to prove they know what’s what, too. While van Gaal is certainly in hot water, the hullabaloo of yesterday was discovered to be totally false.
This, understandably, did not make van Gaal too happy, as you can see above. If he’s a little bit off the mark here—technically, the rumor wasn’t started by the kinds of journalists present at a presser like that—he deserves some leeway, since his larger point is sound. England is saturated with truly terrible, obviously bullshit sport “reporting” that exists for little other reason than to sell papers. So many papers and journalists—like many who would’ve been present at that press conference—do absolutely no due diligence when deciding if a rumor is credible and run with whatever just because it fits their preferred narrative.
Hence van Gaal’s anger, and why we’re inclined to let him live. Good reporters are saying that the Dutchman’s time may soon be up, so there’s no reason to dance on his grave before there’s solid evidence that the axe has actually fallen. And nobody’s going to feel sorry for a roomful of British journalists getting what they have coming.