Ever heard of Didier Baptiste? No!? Don’t worry, most would think so, although the Frenchman, who was hailed as a huge talent, was reportedly on the verge of a move to Liverpool in late 1999. At least that’s what England’s biggest newspapers said unequivocally. Problem: the player didn’t exist at all.
How could that happen? It’s actually hard to believe, but first things first…
In an age when the Internet as we know it today was still in its infancy – far removed from Wikipedia, YouTube or a huge Google database – verifying information and rumors was a lot further than three or four clicks away. A small spark was often enough, which, as in this case, turned into a blazing fire.
The trigger for the media meltdown was a post in an Arsenal forum, when a fan took up a statement by Didier Baptiste and used it for fun to construct a real transfer rumor. A statement from that Didier Baptiste who doesn’t even exist? Right, at least not in the real world.
But as a fictional character of the TV drama series ‘Dream Team’ by sky one. There, Baptiste was a talented left-back for AS Monaco and France Under-21s, who was in negotiations with fictional Premier League side Harchester United.
However, as Baptiste said, there was also interest “from a big club coached by a Frenchman”. When asked if it was Liverpool with Gerard Houllier or Arsenal with Arsene Wenger, he only responded with a meaningful smile.
Back in real life, a journalist from the Hayters news agency finally snapped up that forum post and the wild discussions underneath and wrote a post for the News of the Worldat times the largest-circulation British Sunday newspaper.
“We think Didier Baptiste would be an ideal addition to Liverpool’s back four,” wrote Mike Dunn in his report, which was sold exclusively, and threw a sum of around four million euros into the room. “He’s a really attractive player and you’ll see a lot of him in the News of the World can read.”
Didier Baptiste didn’t really exist at all? “Oops!”
The report went viral by the standards of the time and even ended up in the Reds’ official club call. This was a hotline launched in 1986 by the island’s biggest clubs, where fans could get the latest news by making a paid phone call for 60p a minute. And as luck would have it, the news made it in too The Observerthe Guardians and into the Times.
However, it didn’t take long for the swindle to finally surface. “We were just as amazed as everyone else when we saw this story in the newspapers,” said a spokesman for Dream Team. “We can only assume that someone saw the show and thought it was real.”
“Oops!” was the reply from the sports editor TimesKeith Blackmore, while Hayters said they were conducting “an urgent investigation into this matter”.
Baptiste, meanwhile, ignored interest from Houllier and Wenger and signed for Harchester, where he scored five goals in 44 games in just over a year before falling out of favor at the end of the season after attempting to rig a game and im relegation battle deliberately missed a penalty. Lucky Liverpool.
