It seems that Cristiano Ronaldo's €7m donation to Nepal was all a lie, which originated from the false claims of French magazine 'So Foot' last week.
We're not saying So Foot have priors in the porky-pie department, but in 2011 they did publish a seemingly unfathomable story about footballing renegade Stephen Ireland.
For starters, the Stoke City midfielder, then at Aston Villa, was quoted as saying:
Live in Cork? I'd rather shoot myself. I prefer Los Angeles.
If the quote is legitimate, Ireland would likely be the first Cork man in history to vociferously befoul the Rebel County. But, as a famous fellow Corkonian once told Pat Kenny on the Late Late Show, Ireland isn't from Cork. He's from Cobh.
The midfielder was said to continue:
Ireland just reaps what it has sown. We’ve built buildings just for the sake of it, and at the end of the day no-one lives inside them. It costs a huge amount of money and no-one can pay it back. But I don’t care about Ireland. I really don’t know whether I will ever go back there one day.
Coming from a man who once owned a fish tank worth €175,000, it seems a bit... well... rich. The interview was transcribed by the Examiner at the time, and contains some hugely interesting tirades against Giovanni Trapatoni, Roberto Mancini and Gérard Houllier.
At the time, Ireland refuted the details of his conversation with the So Foot journalist. Well, sort of. Speaking on Newstalk, the divisive Corkman said:
Last week I had a preview of the interview and I asked them to pull it. I said: 'Listen, this is ridiculous, this is not what it was meant to be.'
It was supposed to be 15 questions about what's your favourite colour, what's your favourite this . . . this has strayed so far from the topic, it's just ridiculous.
Hmmm. Ireland went on to wisely deny his sacrilegious remarks on his native county:
I love Cork, I've Cork tattooed on my body.
It's somewhere I go. I've family still there, my best friends are still there, my kids go back there once every two months. If it was that bad to me, I wouldn't have my kids going back there.
In an investigative twist, Broadsheet.ie's 'Chompsky' wrote to So Foot editor Stephane Régy a couple of days later, requesting a recording of their interview with Ireland.
Régy responded with an email which translated as:
Thanks for your message. Yes, we have for sure got the tape recording of the interview which confirms Stephen Ireland’s comments. If you read what he said since the publication of the interview, he never said that these weren’t his words.
It seems that the recording was never received. So Foot are yet to respond to the news that their story of Cristiano Ronaldo's €7m donation to Nepal has been denied to have ever occurred by charity organisation Save The Children.
