Following the announcement of the European Super League, a number of fake quotes attributed to notable figures in football have gone viral on social media.

Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp was the victim of falsely-attributed quotes. According to claims on social media, he reportedly condemned the project as being motivated by “greed”. It was also claimed he had “demanded a meeting” with his club’s ownership.

Elsewhere, it was claimed that Sir Alex Ferguson, the former manager of Manchester United, was supposed to have called the European Super League “a piece of nonsense”, which “sells [supporters] right down the river”.

We also spotted a viral story which claimed that José Mourinho was sacked by one of the breakaway clubs, Tottenham Hotspur, because he “refused to take players onto training ground over the club’s proposed Super League admission.”

All three stories were false. But they are a timely reminder of how we can all fall for fake stories during fast-moving, high-profile and emotive news events.

Several news outlets and social media users have raised concerns about a Covid-19 variant which has been dubbed the “Nigerian variant” (although evidence now suggests that the variant was first detected in the UK). 

Kent Live reported it kills “twice as many people” as other variants, claiming that it has “so far” killed 4.3% of the people it has infected. This is compared with 2.3% of infected people being killed by the so-called “Kent variant”, which is now the most common strain in the UK.

This is misleading, because we simply don’t know the true number of people so far infected by either variant. 

Instead, these death rates are based on the number of deaths occurring among detected cases—and only 328 cases of the “Nigerian variant” have been found so far, which makes it hard to be confident about how deadly it is.  

In February, Public Health England said there was no evidence that this variant causes more severe illness or increased transmissibility.

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