ESPN’s Possible Written Similarities To The Guardian [Per The Legal Team]

Football journalism is a tough business, you know, and ESPN, for all its football follies, has some fantastic writers on the beautiful game. Uli Hesse alone gets the blood pumping to a point that all you want is to hop to a 1970’s Bundesliga match, screw the details (or impossibilities).

However, The Worldwide Leader In Sports may be about to hit some really hot water, as there is a very distinct similarity between a recent Wesley Sneijder article and past words.

The following was published as the opening paragraph on April 19th, 2010 by ESPN writer Svend Frandsen.

This was published February 24th, 2010 by Guardian writer Paolo Bandini.

Unless Paolo is moonlighting, that looks suspicious enough to call in Sherlock Holmes – or the modern equivalent. (Luciano Moggi?)

There’s also a certain similarity to the opening paragraph of Simon Kuper’s February 19th, 2010 Financial Times article.

Frandsen’s ESPN bit.

And since credit goes where credit is due, this was spotted by UbaUba333 and TheCig from the comments section of the ESPN article.

Plagiarism [not accusing - legal team] is a mortal sin in the writing community, but the gravest of sins here is that Wesley Sneijder’s massive ego could find itself overshadowed. Don’t tell Wesley.

Update: You may notice clicking on any variety of Svend’s link will take you to the dungeons of the internet where nothing can be found, particularly files.

ESPN, meanwhile, contacted us with this statement: “Across our sites we expect and pride ourselves on delivering a very high standard. This clearly did not reflect that, and we have taken appropriate action to ensure it does not happen again.”

Let’s hope ‘appropriate action’ includes a cage match with Wesley’s ego.

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Category: World Football