I'm noticing less and less solid transfer news from so called reputable journos year on year. Clearly they have sources. Rio was supposedly a big source for United transfer news. I'm sat here wondering to myself how many players/managers phones were hacked by journos and newspapers like the NOTW? Is this one of the reasons there is such little reputable transfer news any more??
Lack of transfer news due to lack of hacks?
- Thread starter orangeboom999
- Start date
What would Rio know about our transfers?
The theory on here goes that whilst he was a senior player here he was the source of a few leaks from inside the dressing room about all sorts of things.
News content is more readily available than ever before. The rise of twitter has attributed to journalists becoming household names in their own right to a greater extent than they once were. Their writing was all they had to affirm their reputations prior to that.
The rise of social media, in line with an increasingly competitive sports journalism, is bound to lead to greater inaccuracy. Phone hacking was widely interrogated and curtailed, albeit it still exists, but I don't think it was widely used as means to identify transfer stories. Phone hacking had a greater, more important purpose, implemented to prey on the private lives of very high profile people in a very different field.
Good stories still exist like they always have done. Lots of good work regarding Ramos being printed as we speak, for example.
The rise of social media, in line with an increasingly competitive sports journalism, is bound to lead to greater inaccuracy. Phone hacking was widely interrogated and curtailed, albeit it still exists, but I don't think it was widely used as means to identify transfer stories. Phone hacking had a greater, more important purpose, implemented to prey on the private lives of very high profile people in a very different field.
Good stories still exist like they always have done. Lots of good work regarding Ramos being printed as we speak, for example.
He called this one right.
Even colour matched with the board! Snazzy!
Yeah, I take your point. I just keep thinking Paul Gascoigne had his phone hacked for 11 years (let that sink in) and whilst undobtedly he had a very high profile (and combustible) personal life to exploit, is it not naive to think sports personalities wouldn't be susceptible to this. It just strikes me that journos have literally no idea who our targets are or what the fees are etc... 5 - 10 years ago we would have a general idea of who we were after and how much we were looking at paying.
I think it's different for other clubs, Liverpool and arsenal to a lesser extent. The Liv Echo and a few other journalists have excellent contacts at their clubs. It's just a lot tighter at United.
Stuart Mathieson said that he used to ring Fergie every day for news, something which would obviously never happen now. If a transfer of ours breaks now it's nearly always the foreign media who pick it up first.
Stuart Mathieson said that he used to ring Fergie every day for news, something which would obviously never happen now. If a transfer of ours breaks now it's nearly always the foreign media who pick it up first.
All they know now is we have a bucket load of money and need a lot of players. Fergie (and probably some staff/players) had a close relationship with certain journalists through his length of tenure at the club and obviously told them things he wanted them to know; by contrast LVG has been here five minutes and is prickly with the press at the best of times.
I doubt newspapers were taking the risk of hacking phones for something as lightweight as transfer gossip.
I doubt newspapers were taking the risk of hacking phones for something as lightweight as transfer gossip.
Who cares? Frustrated because you don't know who United are signing? Nothing has changed.
In the past we were forced to make some of our transfers public as they needed to be approved by the shareholders. That changed with the Glazers and after that it became increasingly difficult to spot our targets. The situation changed during the Moyes era however I doubt it was because of players (ex Rio). Players wouldn't be involved on whom the club is going to buy. In my opinion it was more of a rather flawed tactic to destabilize the player we wanted while earning brownie points with the same journalists who had the power the put the manager into bad light when things gets wrong. In fact considering Moyes disastrous campaign he got it very lightly from the media
Phone hacking was done over voicemail, unless they've managed to get an email password there is no way the modern player leaves voicemails anymore. Most leaks come from people doing it on purpose rather than snooping. Half the transfer related news is either leaked by a club or agent, rather than an actual player.