The strange world of professional footballers' websites
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Version 0 of 1. Kevin-Prince Boateng This is the daddy. The gold standard. The most remarkable piece of internet architecture you’re ever likely to see. Well, sort of. It’s certainly quite strange. Soundtracked by what sounds very much like the hip-hop option for a demo on a Casio keyboard, complete with inspirational pseudo-rap by the man himself, KPBoateng.com is not quite so much a website as a virtual tour of a ludicrously opulent house, possibly Kevin’s, in which the subject is seen casually draped across assorted preposterous sofas, sunbeds and chairs. When he isn’t relaxing he’s doing keepy-uppies in the kitchen, which as anyone’s mum will tell you is inevitably going to end in calamity. We do see him cooking though – something involving a sauce, best guess is an arrabiata or similar, but that’s pure speculation. The walls of this virtual home are decorated with Banksy rip-offs and, of course, enormous pictures of Boateng himself. There’s another picture of our host on an easel. The house also features a floodlit five-a-side football pitch, indoors. At one point KPB strolls along an elevated walkway and suddenly shoots into the air like a badly-tattooed Superman. On another elevated walkway (because why have just one elevated walkway when you can have loads?), he moonwalks. It basically feels like a cross between a Terry Gilliam film and a first-person shoot-em-up, but instead of zombies or Nazis to kill, up pops Kevin, just living life. The inevitable question is ‘Why?’ There seems to be little point to the site other than to show-off, which is not necessarily a reason not to have a preposterous website, so one assumes it’s simply another status symbol. From cars to houses to wage demands that look like telephone numbers, footballers crave status symbols – how else can you explain a player on £200,000-a-week demanding a raise to £250,000-a-week? There is surely nothing that one could afford with the latter but not the former, so the numbers just become a measurable value of worth, one-upmanship on a payslip. This, it seems, has extended to the internet world. Either that, or he’s just a fan of innovative web design. Or ‘Doom’. Loïc Rémy When you navigate your way on to Loic-Remy.com, you had better not be sat where your boss can see your screen, because the whole site expands to fill the place where a spreadsheet or an invoice should be. The site uses wobbly retro-80s graphics that will either induce a seizure or make you yearn for the days of Kid n Play (your call as to which is preferable there), and you’re then invited to ‘draw’ in order to ‘play’ with Loïc. This basically involves being given an e-crayon, with which you can scrawl something over the image of Rémy standing still, and as soon as you let go of the cursor a football appears, Rémy springs to life and performs a trick. In this scenario, while resisting the urge to give in to base graffiti-related instincts, drawing a question-mark seemed appropriate. The standard options of news and galleries are offered, before one is invited to ‘The Wall’. Loïc performs a short dance, before users are asked if they would like to ‘join the wall’, which at this point seems like it might be some form of neon cult, but in reality simply involves writing your name, and adding a picture. It is, of course, absolutely pointless, but fun … in a pointless sort of way. Moritz Volz You may remember Volz as being a low-level full-back who started life in England at Arsenal, moved to Fulham before returning to Germany, where he now plays for 1860 Munich. He’s also a confirmed ‘character’, a man who doesn’t so much flirt with ‘wackiness’ as invites it up to his mirror-ceilinged flat for coffee. Exhibit A is the song that plays on his official website, an odd non-specifically European (there’s oompa, there’s an accordion, there’s what sounds like a slide whistle) version of ‘Englishman In New York’, that references German sausage and Nightrider, two of Volz’s passions, apparently. ‘If you want to share a bit of banter and see what I’m up to, this is the place,’ we are informed, and given an email address to direct this banter to the right place. We are offered a selection of Moritz’s favourite restaurants, which include Gourmet Burger Kitchen and, inevitably, Nando’s, as well as some of his favourite tunes – ‘Falling Slowly’ from the film ‘Once’ and ‘Bentley’s Gonna Sort You Out’ by Bentley Rhythm Ace make the cut. ‘Volzy’ also used to write a diary, in which he expressed his love for David Hasselhoff, among other things, but sadly that seems not to have been updated for a couple of years - ever since he signed for 1860, in fact, so perhaps a jobsworth at the club has banned him from sharing his most intimate thoughts with the world. It’s all quite self-consciously zany, which should be fairly irritating, but there’s something quite sweet in the way he has collated his appearances in the media, from an archive of his old columns for The Times, to screengrabs of a semi-regular slot in The Observer’s Said & Done column. A footballer with some self-awareness and personality, even if that personality is mildly-annoying, is more than welcome. Andrey Arshavin A fairly basic number, in particular when compared with some of the other sites on this list, but what Arshavin.eu lacks in whizz-bang internet bells and whistles, it makes up for in the personal touch. As you might be aware, when he was at Arsenal Arshavin would take questions from the fans, about football, life, the universe and everything, and post them on his site. Why? Who can say, but the results were often enjoyable. Some choice cuts include: Q: What do you think of Grigory Rasputin? A: This man had a certain talent that allowed him to wield power over people. I think that he was an eccentric person. Q: Andrey, are you frightened of bears? A: On the contrary, I like bears. Q: What was it like living in the USSR, and would it make modern Britain a better place? If you plan to lead a communist uprising in the UK, I would gladly help you storm Buckingham Palace. A: Here in England I often catch myself thinking that everything here will be just the same in a hundred years’ time and even after that, everything will be just the way it is now. Don’t change anything, you don’t need any revolutions. Q: Hello there! , what would you say your political views are? A: Globally speaking I’m for world peace. Q: Do you use hair gel??? If you do what type do you use?? What’s your favorite hairstyle??? I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ your hair? A: I don’t have an ad contract with any hair gel producer. I use water before the game. A lot depends on water chemical composition. Alas, since he returned to Russia, the Q&A sessions appear to have ceased. Javier Mascherano This doesn’t look quite so much like a website for a professional athlete as one for a high-end software development company. There are swooshes and swashes and the pictures – described as ‘sick’ by one member of the Guardian Sport desk - do a weird pulsing thing when you click into a story. It seems to be a theme with many modern players’ sites, like André Schürrle’s, which offers some smashing visuals, about 50 words of text then rather adorably a ‘gallery’ option, as if the rest of the site hadn’t just been shiny images: it perhaps shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the website for a professional footballer is a victory of style over substance. Tragically though, Mascherano’s site seems to be a fancy new toy that someone got Javier for Christmas that he’s left to gather dust on a shelf somewhere. The first – and only – entry in the ‘news’ section is a perfunctory report on Barcelona’s 4-0 Champions League win over Milan in March 2013, which appears to have been written by a frustrated A-level poet. Everything happened just as he had dreamed. Barça will be in the quarter-finals of the Champions League. It was a perfect night, where Tito’s boys showed its best. And Milan succumbed. Fin. Michael Owen Michael Owen is … shall we say, not the most engaging of chaps, and his website is very much a mirror of the man. In fairness the homepage is dedicated to raising money to charity, but what should tell you plenty about the former England international and his priorities is that a link to his horse racing stable is given equal weight to that of his football career. Also, there’s an app which one can download onto one’s smartphone; an app that ‘automatically updates when I add exclusive audio and video clips which I record on my iPhone.’ You’ll forgive us if we don’t find the nearest wifi spot and get downloading as quickly as possible. Darius Vassell It’s not often that one feels sorry for a professional footballer, but you’d have to have a stone, stone cold heart not to have pangs of sympathy for Darius Vassell after reading some of the entries on his blog. Vassell started the blog after moving to Turkish side Ankaragücü, and was largely filled with some rather downbeat missives about being cooped up in a hotel room, not really knowing anyone and not being paid by his club. The blog started up again a couple of years later, and wasn’t a great deal chirpier. Take the following post, from October 2013: Right now at 12.45am I sit in the car parked outside in the local shopping centre car park . A quiet night not feeling at all like October , there’s barely a hint of wind in the air and the temperature strangely not that cold at all. I think about how busy this area will be in a few hours when the hustle and bustle of everyday life kicks in around 8am for the people of my home town Knowle but for now its almost too quiet … Tapping away on my ipad screen the sound of my fingertips are the only thing audible as I contemplate my plans for the rest of the week. Everyone is in bed I suspect, asleep and preparing for the next day but I feel quite awake having just popped out of the house to find myself something cool to drink. (Not alcohol!) I made the mistake of having a nap at around 7pm and waking to watch what was a decent film in “The rules of engagement” starring Samuel L Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones… I think about my Grandad who has been ill lately back in Jamaica and anticipate the opportunity of flying out to visit him and my family out there, will need to make arrangements. It’s also a good time to think about getting my heating serviced in preparation for winter. For this month there is little to report about so I will update as necessary as my situation changes but for now I might need to leave this car park and just settle for a glass of water back home. You just want to give him an enormous hug, don’t you? The blog has been closed now. We hope he’s doing OK. Tom Cleverley A couple of years ago, when Tom Cleverley was a promising young player and everybody hadn’t written him off as a crab-like waste of space, he broke into the Manchester United team and showed some potential. However, he got injured, and decided to fill the time by creating a website, producing TC23 merchandise and hiring a marketing company to work on his ‘brand.’ “I enjoyed working with Creative Spark on the project and I am very pleased with the TC23 brand image,” he said in February 2012. At this point, it should be noted, he had made a grand total of five Premier League starts for United, and both website and ‘brand’ didn’t go down well. TomCleverley23.com was quite a thing, and while Cleverley clarified that the purpose was to raise money for charity, he became so (understandably) irked with the abuse that he closed both website and his Twitter account. So you’ll have to take our word for it about the site. |