I don’t speak Arabic and I don’t trust google translate to get nuance, so I’m going to copy and paste a comment from a different forum I frequent:
"the entire thing is a joke. Al Watan never reported anything. Any person who properly reads Arabic knows that the tweet itself started with “news reports:” and that it indicates the tweet was aggregating, similar to the bbc rumors page or a filler article that says “reports in Spain suggest…” with no info claimed of its own.
the editor was retweeting fake Fabrizio Romano accounts. He was simply fooled into thinking there’s were substantive reports elsewhere that the deal was done, and made a tweet indicating that “News reports:”The paper has tweeted 3-4 times in the past few months doing the same aggregating on Guardian articles, and even the Sun staying sheikh Jassim would buy West Ham if he failed at United.
It is a joke that it even made it to the stage where questions were being asked and so many misled, there never was a claim that it was done by the Qatari paper, period. "
Thanks for this, I had heard that the origin was questionable but hadn’t had a chance to look into it
No worries. Same sort of rubbish we read every day about United signing every player under the sun.
Thanks for following up on this. My Arabic isnt the best so I could not sif through the rumor. Oh well another addition to Tier 4 news
No worries. Seems like all sorts of outlets just went mad with it. Decent article on the athletic on the whole ordeal.
Gah, this isn’t good. Could be on the verge of our first megathread and it’s definitely not the one I would have wanted!
Follow up to what I just posted, tweet from the editor of the paper: https://twitter.com/fahedalemadi/status/1668574524391018497?s=46&t=9VaAnKpRpp3Ftvhr0VtiUQ
“For more clarification “Contrary to certain media and social media reports overnight, Al Watan is not owned by Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and Al Watan’s media report yesterday speculating about possible movement in the Manchester United takeover process was based on international media reports, as stated in the article itself, and with such news widely circulating periodically in international media for many months.””
Too much smoke for there not to be a fire for this one. This is reported in the Qatari media.
BBC had also speculated in the morning that Qatar is the front runner. Looks like we’ll hear something in the English media tomorrow. Just unfortunate that the fans are just bystanders in this ‘business transaction’.
People keep saying that this will bring in money. The issue is that we never had, or should have a money problem. The Glazers did that to the club.
In either case, I hope whoever it is helps Ten Hag build the squad, the club improve infrastructure and also help the city as a whole.
