Last week, British magazine Coach published what they contended was an exclusive interview with Lionel Messi, in which the Barcelona star supposedly said he would like to stay at Barcelona.
It turns out they published nothing of the sort.
The "interview" has been taken down and replaced with this message:
It has come to our attention that the authenticity of this interview has been questioned. We have removed the interview while we investigate.
I doubt we'll ever see the results of that "investigation", because I think they already know what happened: they made up an interview with Messi to drive traffic to their website, got caught and now are pretending they don't know how this could have happened.
It seems the powers that be at Coach are trying to contend they didn't know the interview was fake. For a small publisher like Coach, an exclusive with Lionel Messi would be a game-changer. The editors would know whether or not it was real.
Messi is a big get for even a large publication, in part because he is so famous everyone wants to talk to him and in part because he is pretty shy and doesn't really want to talk to anyone. Any editor worth a sh*t would be skeptical if someone came to him or her with an exclusive Messi interview.
And if in that interview, Messi, who is usually very reserved when talking to the media, made some headline-worthy claims about his footballing future, a decent editor would be even more skeptical.
If, however, Coach didn't make the interview up and it was all real, could someone tell them to send us his contact information?
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