Cristiano Ronaldo has over 19 million followers on Twitter.
Nineteen million…
He’s a top class footballer admittedly, the only whom George Best deemed worthy of the ‘New George Best’ tag, but why so many people want to know the mundane ins and outs of his daily life is beyond me.
Wayne Rooney, presumably from a luxury seat on a private jet, may well have tweeted to his 6.6 million followers on his trip home from his short lived sojourn in Bangkok.
Now if he had tweeted ‘@Jose, I’m on my way where can we meet? #Chelseasuperblues’, it might have been noteworthy, but he was never going to do that.
If he had for instance used the 140 characters to describe his food en route back to England he would have probably been subject to the kind of ‘You have more money than sense’ diatribe beloved of keyboard warriors everywhere.
So what’s the point of twitter then?
Well, allegedly it makes fans feel part of footballers lives, but how sad is that, really it’s just one step above hacks looking in players bins for snippets of information, and slightly more useful.
There are rare exceptions of course, Liverpool’s Daniel Agger suffered a nightmare end to the game against West Brom last season, and was duly slaughtered by Kopites everywhere who had access to twitter.
What was surprising in the extreme was Agger’s response, ‘I agree with most of you, my performance in the last ten minutes was NOT good enough’ he tweeted, a most unusual example of a footballers tweet being both honest and accurate.
A more typical example though was when Wolves Jamie O’Hara declared ‘I am on £35,000 a week and things were so much simpler when I was on 100 pound a week YTS’.
Predictably he was hammered; even more predictably he shut his account down.
And yet they cannot help themselves.
James McClean at Sunderland didn’t want to wear a poppy on remembrance day – he’s Irish, it’s not a big deal – but when he told the world all hell broke loose.
His manager at the time Martin O’Neill, from a generation pre-twitter, told him in no uncertain terms to cop himself on, which he did temporarily before emerging again to declare his favourite pre match tune was The Broad Black Brimmer, a pro-IRA Republican song.
The words of another song springs to mind, as Peter Paul and Mary asked back in the sixties ‘When will they ever learn’.
Tweeting is for the birds, it comes naturally to them.
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