5) Joe.co.uk
Let’s ease ourselves into the cesspool that is social media with a gentle chastisement of a Facebook page that has lost its way.
The football section of the hugely successful enterprise that is Joe began life with serious intentions, focusing on weighty matters and covering them in a measured and balanced tone.
Only at some juncture it was clearly decided that the page should head down the ‘bantz’ route, looking for easy clicks and aiming their content at those who think Micah Richards is a ‘ledge’ because he laughs a lot.
This is a shame and this is why we’re not allowed nice things.
4) Manchester United’s Twitter
Some sympathy is warranted for whichever poor soul is tasked with running United’s official Twitter account because they can hardly be truthful can they?
They can hardly admit this is one of the club’s worst seasons in living memory, exacerbated by off-the-field problems that have caused a great deal of disharmony to descend on Old Trafford.
Instead, with so many of the account’s 37 and a half million followers wanting only positivity – and perhaps too, a continuation of the conceit that they are still the formidable United of old – what is produced, and what the grim reality is, often conjures up hilarious discord.
Nowhere was this more pertinent than two Augusts ago, when an opening day bettering of Leeds was accompanied by a tweet that showed United top of the table on a mighty three points.
“Don’t say it,” was written above the image, intimating that a title challenge was in the offing. United ultimately finished sixth, 35 points behind the champions Manchester City.
3) Indykaila News
What’s the betting Indykaila News is a parody? It surely has to be but whether it is or it isn’t, the joke ran dry a long, long time ago.
For those fortunate enough to be unaware of this ludicrous ‘award winning’ account, it thrives on the notion that the individual behind the constant stream of nonsensical transfer bluster is ‘in-the-know’.
Moreover, he – or they – are the best of chums with every influential person in football, from agents to CEOs.
Rumours persist that the person responsible actually works for a well-known fast food chicken chain. Twitter really is an odd place at times, isn’t it.
2) @TrollFootball
In truth, a hundred different banter sites could have been selected, all of them responsible for killing off another sliver of your soul every time you accidentally encounter one of their feeble attempts to be humourous.
TrollFootball has been singled out here simply because it’s made us scowl more than the rest of late.
Posting multiple times a day, usually in the form of memes and photoshopped ‘jokes’ that are juvenile and wholly lacking in nuance, their overt efforts to be ‘edgy’ is pretty much the only funny thing about them.
It’s the internet’s equivalent of a toddler saying ‘bum’.
1) Joey Barton
As a player, Barton was a favourite of the live betting market, he being a regular collector of cautions and red cards.
If only he could be sent for an early bath from Twitter.
Having failed to make the grade in club management, and finding punditry work hard to come by, he took to social media like a bitter man turns to whisky.
What we have witnessed in recent weeks is a hateful individual unravelling before our very eyes and that would evoke some form of sympathy were it not for his truly despicable content.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
