Warren Dell

(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.

Darren Bent is probably the best example of how Twitter has allowed football fans to gain a closer insight into a footballers life that regular interviews don’t and it even secured him a move away from his old club Tottenham Hotspur when his move to Sunderland hit a snag. His outburst about chairman Daniel Levy had to be deleted but with the press reaction and subsequent completion of the move Twitter had entered the sporting mainstream conscience.

American football player Antonio Cromartie was fined $2,500 for complaining about the team meals the players were served.

Aussie cricketer Phillip Hughes revealed he’d been dropped for the third test during the Ashes series last year in England.

And finally, want away footballers beware as it doesn’t always work out like it did for Darren Bent as Crystal Palace youngster Ashley-Paul Robinson found out when he revealed he was having trials with Fulham on his Facebook page, not realising the papers would soon pick up on this story. He was subsequently told by Crystal Palace to look elsewhere and now plays for Dulwich Hamlet, many leagues below that of either Palace or Fulham.

With the national press using Twitter more and more to source stories, professional sports team may start clamping down on their players using social networking, but I like many others hope this won’t stop us getting an insight into a sport stars world.

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This entry was posted by admin on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 7:29 am. It is filed under News, Social Media and has these tags: darren bent, manchester city, manchester united, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.