Manchester United ban social media (UPDATED)
January 20th, 2010
(UPDATE)
Since publishing this post The Manchester Evening News report on the story has confirmed that United’s neighbours and rivals Manchester City have also advised their players not to set up social networking pages.
Manchester United football club have banned their players from maintaining social network profiles on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitter accounts held by players Darren Fletcher, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs were all removed, as revealed by football blog EPL Talk. Ryan Giggs also had content removed from his Facebook page as well as team mate Rio Ferdinand.
The football club may have done this to make sure traffic that they feel should be coming to their website isn’t aimed elsewhere and missing out on revenue opportunities. Although there are literally thousands of fan created sites around out of their control so it seems that they are doing this to protect themselves from any comments from their players getting them in trouble as has already happened in the sporting world.
With many incidents causing teams to punish or ban permanently players from using social networking sites this won’t be the last time professional sports and social media will collide. Read the rest for my favourite incidents where sports teams have put their foot down over social networking or a star player has landed himself in a bit of bother.
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