Ramsey to United because…

You can call me algorithm
So you’re a mildly successful football website and you know that a massive chunk of your traffic comes from transfer rumours. And yet you can’t bring yourself to actually make sh*t up because you’ve managed to convince yourself that you’re on a par with the BBC and other supposed ‘journals’ of record. What do you do? You need an ‘in’; you need an excuse; f*** it, you need an algorithm.
And so Sky Sports have entered into a ‘partnership’ with Football Whispers (2,000 Twitter followers and rising), who ‘have developed a unique algorithm to take all of the transfer rumours from across the globe and calculate the likelihood of them happening’. Except, well, they haven’t. What they’ve done is develop a uniquely useless algorithm that calculates how much a rumour is being discussed. This absolutely does not ‘calculate the likelihood of them happening’; we cannot make this clearer.
‘Like most algorithms there are plenty of elements taken into account when calculating the eventual score for each Whisper,’ say Sky Sports, helpfully explaining the concept of an algorithm. Thanks for that.
‘Which are the most credible Manchester United transfer rumours right now?’ is the question then asked under the SEO-tastic headline of ‘Manchester United transfer rumours: Arsenal’s Aaron Ramsey linked’. That exasperated, gutteral cry is the sound of Mediawatch screaming “Most credible? Most credible? Is it f*** the most credible” while simultaneously attempting to come to terms with the consequences of Brexit.
So ‘the most credible Manchester United transfer rumour right now’ is not about Zlatan Ibrahimovic – crucially, not now ‘credible’ because hardly anybody is currently talking about it – but Aaron Ramsey. Aaron sodding Ramsey.
Oddly, a nonsense transfer rumour involving two of the Premier League’s golden trio of clubs (when it comes to internet activity, at least) has scored highly in the key algorithm component of ‘Volume of Whispers’, defined as ‘the number of blogs, articles, posts and tweets across the internet talking about a specific transfer rumour’. Who would ever have thunk it?
And that – ladies of gentlemen – makes the concept of Arsenal selling Aaron Ramsey to Manchester United more ‘credible’ than a Zlatan to Manchester United transfer that is so inevitable that you can no longer place bets.
Mediawatch is long past the point where we are depressed by internet hits being hoovered up by bullsh*t transfer rumours, but please have the balls not to pretend that this is science; the only numbers that matter here are the ones on Google Analytics.