Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani was reported to have won the race to buy Manchester United but in truth the Qatari banker is still waiting to hear back from the Glazers, just like Sir Jim Ratcliffe
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. "
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.