There's been a story going around about how Liverpool bought £20 million underachiever Stewart Downing because the club's American owners were so impressed by the blatantly doctored viral video above produced by Aston Villa two summers ago. This, of course, is a ridiculous tale and beyond stupid and something no one could ever believe. Except, a number of people did and the story was reported by a great many outlets of varying reputations.
In fact, the story has become so popular that Liverpool's official website has now released a statement to debunk it:
Tom Werner today laughed off suggestions that Liverpool had bought Stewart Downing on the back of a YouTube video.
"Someone told me about this," said the Reds Chairman. "It's a great story, but unfortunately for the person who wrote the piece, it isn't true. It actually comes from an interview I did five months ago with Ian Ayre for our club TV channel in which I said that when we first talked about signing Stewart, we'd found a video of him kicking footballs into some trash cans.
"I explained in that interview back in August we knew the footage had been doctored but I guess that detail doesn't really help stand up the story.
"The amount of people involved and the work that goes into a signing a player is huge so the suggestion that we'd buy someone on the back of one doctored video is ridiculous."
Liverpool is, however, increasingly convinced that all footage it saw of Andy Carroll before signing him was tampered with by Newcastle*.
*Feel free to change that to Chelsea/Fernando Torres/Liverpool if you prefer.
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