The Masal Bugduv Hoax

By: Daryl | January 16th, 2009

A brilliant football hoax was uncovered yesterday, leaving The Times looking a bit silly after they included a non-existent Moldovan wonderkid Masal Bugduv at #30 in their list of Football’s 50 Rising Stars.

30. Masal Bugduv (Olimpia Balti)

Moldova’s finest, the 16-year-old attacker has been strongly linked with a move to Arsenal, work permit permitting. And he’s been linked with plenty of other top clubs as well.

Oddly enough, the hoax was spotted right here on The Offside. Except not by us. We included a link to The Times list in Tuesday’s Daily Dose and received a comment about said list from Russian writer/blogger Makki:

“30. Masal Bugduv (Olimpia Balti) … such player doesn’t exist, it is fake.”

If we’d been a bit more on the ball, we would have followed up Makki’s comment to see what he was talking about. But we weren’t, so we didn’t.

Makki did some research himself, trying to find evidence that this 16 year old wonderkid Bugdav actually existed, and finding that no, he probably didn’t.

This caught the attention of Fredorrarci from SoccerLens, who did some good old-fashioned online detective work to figure out exactly how and why The Times had been fooled.

If you want to read up on exactly what Fredorrarci found, I highly recommend reading their post in full here. It’s great great work.

Here’s a summary of what was uncovered:

Basically, some merry prankster out there has been planting stories about Masal Bugduv – the 16 year old Moldavan miracle – all over the internet, including leaving what look like copy and pasted Associated Press stories about Bugduv – Liverpool trying to beat Arsenal to his signature and the youngster making his international debut – which Fredorrarci disproved by searching the real AP archives for mentions of Bugduv (none) and checking the Moldovan FA website for mentions of Bugduv (none).

Goal.com mentioned Masal Bugduv, but had gotten the information from that same copy and pasted fake AP report, which is a fantastic example of how you can put something online and watch is spread like wildfire (goal.com have since acknowledged their mistake).

Fredorrarci’s Moldovan source also spotted that one of the fake AP sources about Bugduv going to Arsenal cited a “top sports daily” from Moldova called “Diario Mo Thon”, which didn’t actually exist. But it was a massive clue, because…

And it’s here that we may have hit the nub of the issue. It seems certain that “Masal Bugduv” is the invention of a prankster, likely from Ireland. Mo Thón, you see, is the Irish for “my arse”.

Ha.

When this story was picked up by The Guardian yesterday (both in The Fiver and on the GU Sports blog, it was pointed out that the name Masal Bugduv is actually an English bastardisation of “M’asal beag dubh”, which is an old Irish children’s story by Pádraic Ó Conaire, which translates as “Little Black Donkey.”

Even better, “Little Black Donkey” is a story about a man who spends all his budget on a useless donkey (ha). Click yourself over to Run of Play for a synopsis of the story.

So, all in all, great stuff. A brilliant and well thought out prank, and an impressive bit of sophisticated satire. Top work by everyone who pulled it off, and also those involved in exposing the hoax so we can all enjoy it. And commiserations to whoever put that list together at The Times.

If we’re honest, it’s easy to see how The Times were duped. When putting together a list like that, you’re inevitably relying on online information and therefore susceptible to such a well-detailed bit of skullduggery. I could easily see myself doing the same thing.

But now that the cat (or the little black donkey) is out of the bag, it’s probably time The Times admitted that they got done. And that means doing a bit more than just deleting Masal Bugduv from the #30 spot and replacing him with Jay Simpson…