Valencia Twitter account’s pretend drunken antics
The LaLiga club claimed they’d handed the account over to an intern, only to be reprimanded by Bayer Leverkusen.
Anyone following Valencia’s English language Twitter account on Friday would have wondered if they were actually following a respectable footballing institution or a student who'd accidentally guessed the password to a Twitter account with just over 50,000 followers.
The day started with the claim that the account was being handed over to “the newest intern” on the grounds that it was international break.
This was followed by a fake CV of the fake intern and the first 'gag' of the day. “I thought I applied for a football manager position but I ended up as a CM”.
From there, things started turning a little strange, with tweets featuring men's guts and a stream of comments about reaching a certain number of followers if the “intern” John was to keep his job. All of which was patently false.
And then the account started chatting about booze.
Which led to @juanxMata to ask Bayer Leverkusen to get involved. Which they did, but by taking the moral high ground.
The Valencia CM tried to get some banter going but whoever was running Leverkusen's account was having none of it. And called out Valencia's account for simply chasing followers.
The 'intern joke' finally ended on Saturday morning with the supposedly real CM coming back in.
Over recent weeks Valencia's English language account has been trying different 'zany' approaches to their fan engagement, including a pretend cyberattack, with the campaigns being masterminded by a new office manager.
The thinking is presumably that any attention is good attention and will lead to an increased number of people engaging. And it seems to be working, with the account putting on 3,445 new followers yesterday and over another 1,000 today, as media outlets picked up the story and covered it. Oh, hang on a second...
