An amateur football team from Dublin has apologised after falsely reporting that one of their players had died in order to get a match postponed.
Ballybrack FC informed the Leinster Senior League (LSL) that Fernando Nuno La-Fuente had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Their game against Arklow Town on Saturday was subsequently postponed, with a minute’s silence held before the league’s other fixtures.
The league “placed a notice in Irish newspaper The Herald before the LSL chairman, David Moran, became suspicious of the club’s story and dug deeper”, says The Guardian.
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“We rang and we couldn’t get any answers out of them,” Moran told RTÉ Sport. “We checked the hospitals, everywhere. Nobody could find anything about this young fella. Some of his teammates [then] released stuff on social media, saying he went back to Spain four weeks ago.”
After discovering that La-Fuente was in fact alive and well in his homeland, the league issued a statement that “the notification of the death of a Ballybrack player is without foundation”.
La-Fuente, who had recently moved out of the area told RTE Radio he knew a story was being cooked up, potentially in a bid to force the abandonment because “they had a rough time getting players”.
“My work started sending me all these news articles – that's how I found out I was dead,” LaFuente said.
The Spaniard said the club contacted him last week to let him know he may hear reports he had been involved in an accident.
He added: “I was taken out [of the WhatsApp group] on Saturday. I knew something was going on and they called me and said ‘Okay Fernando, you might see the League post something on Twitter saying you had an accident’. But I thought it was going to be a broken leg type accident.”
“I have a really good relationship with them. It was just to let me know. As soon as I heard the news, I wrote to them. They got straight back to me and told me what was going on and they apologised,” he said.
In a statement Ballybrack blamed the incident on a member of the senior management team who had subsequently been let go and “has been experiencing severe personal difficulties unbeknownst to any other members of the club”.
Moran has said he will meet the club today to decide what punishment they will face. “One of the first things we’ll have to do is figure out what rules they broke,” he added. “We’ve never had anything like this before.
“We don’t honestly know why they did it. All they had to say was they were giving a walkover, they’ll get their fine and that’s the end of it,” he added.
“It’s very extreme to get a game off. We acted in good faith. We had a minute’s silence at the weekend for that young lad. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
