What with the global pandemic and the whole end of tourism as we know it, there really isn’t all that much that gets us excited these days at YPT, until I received one very explosive e-mail.
Our partner and colleague on football projects Paul Watson, formerly of CONIFA, sent a link to an alleged score league in Nauru. At first, it seemed too good to be true; it was.
A Background to Football in Nauru
I’ll give a little background on Nauru and why this story is of interest to us. Nauru is famous for a number of things, but I’ll start with a few main ones, it is the least visited country on earth, the most obese and famously the only UN nation never to have ran a single football league, or team!
To Learn More About Football in Nauru Click Here.
Imagine our surprise when there was a new website claiming an eight-team league and posting (very conservative) weekly results. If you’ve ever seen the documentary don’t fuck with cats, this was us with fake football in Nauru.
Why Is Sit Fake?
We knew in our hearts of hearts, it had to be fake for a number of reasons but felt we needed evidence. We duly contacted the head of the actual Nauru Football Association, who confirmed it was indeed not real, so I decided to continue investigating how deep this went.
Deep Fake Nauru Soccer League
he hoax, or at worst fraudulent creators of the site, had been smart enough to add themselves to Wikipedia, which meant a number of other Wiki’s added it too. But this was to the worst of it, with Wikipedia being seen as the fonts of global knowledge a number of respectable soccer score websites were now posting the scores as real! For a few weeks, at least the Nauru Soccer League was tricking the world.
Being the upstanding gentlemen that we were, we made sure Wikipedia was amended, informed relevant parties and made sure the real FA knew about the imposters. We are also posting this! Part of our duty to inform the world about this fake league.
How Good Was the Fake?
I am not going to link to these guys, but the fact that they used Nauru DOT me was an immediate red flag. But the main problems were the website being too damned good.
Let us list the problems!
- An 8 team league! The national sport in Nauru is Aussie Rules, it has an 8 team league.
- All players listed – Most of them had African names
- Low scores – Ever watched low-level football? You get wild scores and not so many 0-0’s
- Weird team names – Kudos for the effort put into team names and badges, but still, stank of fake!
- The head of the Nauru FA said it was fake
This is our take on the Nauru Soccer League!
Is the Nauru Soccer League real? No, no, it is not!
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