Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock… Behind their computer, a few hours before the official closing of the transfer market, this Friday evening at 11:59 p.m., the creators of the PSG Community account would they be smoking a bar of chair, toes fanned out, champagne chilled, while waiting for their scoop on the sale of Kylian Mbappé to Real Madrid for a record amount of 250 million to be formalized?
Or are they rather thinking about the aliases they will choose before boarding the Paris-Guadalajara flight at 10:50 p.m. to escape the gegenpressing that they risk eating each other if their prophecy does not come true, which currently seems the (by far) most likely scenario? We would have liked to ask them the question but they did not respond to our request.
The PSG Community case study
This summer, the soap opera Mbappé at Real Madrid will have been mainly fueled, not by a Madrid press convinced for several weeks now that the transfer will not take place and for once full of humility, but by the Twitter account of PSG Community (and some other Spanish accounts), which announced as early as June 22 that it was “OVER! between the Kyks and Paname and that an agreement was sealed between Nasser Al-Khelaïfi and Florentino Perez. Amazing information that will never have found the slightest echo in the most informed French sports press about PSG, The Team, The Parisian or RMC, but which has not prevented our budding mercatix from remaining straight in their boots until today, despite all logic.
So, conspiratorial delirium, delusions of grandeur, total blindness or immense naivety on the part of these boys without the slightest experience in the “mercato game”? Probably a bit of all of that at the same time. For the journalist The Team Arnaud Hermant, PSG specialist, who confirms to us in the preamble that “Real has never made an offer to PSG this summer”, their justifications are “perhaps only a way for them to cling to the branches “.
“It’s like when we are told that transfers are ruined when they are revealed too early. But when a transfer needs to happen, it happens. That the media revelation disturbs, it is possible, that it complicates the deal, it is also possible, but it remains exceptional all the same that an info goes so far as to derail a transfer, ”he assures . The most likely explanation – and the most desirable for their future credibility – would be that they were carried around by a source in whom they placed blind trust, to the point of insisting that they alone had the truth and that the other media were lying to us all the way.
Sourced info vs cross-checked info, a major difference
Editor-in-chief of Paris United, the former Twitter account specializing in the Paris transfer window, which announced the arrival of Neymar in 2017, and which has since become a more traditional PSG analysis media, Mouss knows Miloud Kotbi well, the founder of PSG Community. Feeling the XXL crash coming full force, he tried to reason with his friend during the summer.
“I called Miloud in August to try to reason with him because I knew there was no agreement, especially not in June. But he was convinced, he spoke to me like a journalist, cross-checking information, I told him ”stop taking yourself for someone else, you don’t cross-check anything at all. You blindly believed someone, he’s going to take you to the wall and that’s it. He didn’t want to listen to me… And then they’re going to get expensive and that bothers me because Miloud is a good guy”.
If they assure that their info has been “sourced” and that it is shielded from all sides, it is now possible to doubt it. Because a sourced info, basically, it does not mean much. Arnaud Hermant, who makes a point of specifying that he has nothing against PSG Community (“strong friendly people”) professes: “The rule of the trade is to have several sources which confirm the first. However, when it concerns a very touchy subject like the future of Mbappé, there are very few people in the know. You must therefore have absolute confidence in your sources. And if you don’t, you can end up trapped, held hostage, and you end up making mistakes and writing nonsense. “Or to say, as during a space twitter animated by the band of PSG Community become legend during August, for the amount of nonsense debited by the minute. An excerpt, among many others:
We are disturbing. The press is not the truth, the press is no longer independent. Read between the lines. Let’s wake up, we know very well that we are ma-ni-pu-les. There must be media like ours that give the right information, the true one in the true sense of the term. »
PSG are playing a dangerous game
If we talk today mainly about PSG Community, we should not believe that they have the monopoly of “true truths” (as the Unknowns said) of transfer window information on social networks. From “Sabri Parisien or nothing” to “PSG Inside Actu” via “La Source Parisienne”, we have been witnessing for several years a multiplication of these fan accounts presenting themselves as the new white knights of information.
Paradoxically, PSG is no stranger to this. By choosing to grant accreditation to press conferences and Rouge et Bleu matches to these fans, sometimes even hiring them (like Sabri, who was remunerated up to 1,000 euros per match to manage the club’s Snapchat when it was created) or by offering them small gifts in kind (jerseys, goodies, trips during marketing tours), a practice now common in most major football clubs that take great care of their influencers, or even by distilling snippets of information here and there (false or proven), PSG played with fire.
“When he was at war with us and we were boycotted, PSG fed these fan accounts in order to transmit certain information and discredit the media such as The Team Or The Parisian. He instrumentalized accounts like these because they knew that through them he was speaking directly to his supporters. On arrival, he contributed to the development of this phenomenon”, regrets our colleague from The Team.
“Some at the club indulge in this little game, it’s undeniable, confirms a well-informed source within the Parisian club. They even go so far as to think that they can completely overturn the table and dispense with the influence of the traditional media by increasing that of these media-supporters. In my opinion, this is a mistake because it means forgetting that you cannot manage all of your speech and your messages through these fan accounts, managed by people who do not have all the journalistic rigor and reflexes ethics of your colleagues. »
A few exceptions to the table
It should however, to end on a positive note, to specify that all these newcomers in the great game of the transfer window are not all (nor all the time) next to their pumps. If he too had a lot of failures (Zidane and Pogba at PSG), Sabri Parisien ou Rien is the first in France to have announced, totally against the current of the information that came out at that time, that Mbappé would not sign not at Real last summer and would extend his contract in Paris.
“He has his entrances to the club, he has real relays inside, he knows certain players and I think he sometimes has information that is credible”, tells us a connoisseur on condition of anonymity. “It’s a bit of Nasser Al-Khelaïfi’s toy, to which he is close,” adds another. During this investigation, another name kept coming back (for good) to our ears when it came to talking about the PSG transfer window. Him is Jamal. Chance or coincidence, he is also the only one to have agreed to talk to us to tell us a little more about his way of working.
After having published a first transfer information on Twitter three or four years ago, and seeing that it had subsequently been confirmed in the media, this boy, who does not wish to give details about him, decided to develop its network and make its information available to its community. He can now boast – with supporting evidence on his Twitter feed – that he has never been wrong about the slightest scoop, big or small.
Earn credibility
“You can never be sure that what you are told is true, so you have to cross-check as much as possible to sort it out and in general it is very rare that I trust only one person, or else it is that I have a very good relationship with it. If necessary, I always try to have at least three or four confirmations. For the moment it has worked rather well because I have never made a mistake before, but there is no doubt that it will happen”, he replied by email, before giving us the keys to his success, him, the “ simple supporter” which weighs on Twitter (41,000 subscribers).
“Without going into details, I would say that the world of football is very small. Every person in the industry who discovers me sees very quickly that I am someone I can trust and that I am not looking for buzz, so it helps to forge a relationship of trust. Building a relationship of trust helps to forge links with people in the industry and that changes because, in this industry, many are looking for buzz and if they have a big piece of information, they will rush to get it out. even if it can create problems behind. »
Accused by the football Twittosphere of being in this situation about their Mbappé scoop, and of taking the opportunity to fill their pockets via post monetization set up by Elon Musk (which remains to be proven as it is necessary to reach hundreds of millions of tweets seen to hope to raise even a small nest egg), the band of PSG Community is about to learn it at his expense. Unless they are right and in this case we will whip each other in public place Friday evening the blows of 00:01. Otherwise, they assured it in their Space: “We have solid support, we are passionate about the job and about PSG and we have no reason to abandon our project. We will assume and we will always be there to discuss ”. See you in a few hours for the final verdict. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.