What do a fake goal-animation video and the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle have in common?
More than you might think.
In the 64th minute of Arsenal’s trip to bitter local rivals Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday, Gabriel sent the pocket of away fans into delirium. His header, from another well-worked Arsenal corner routine, was the decisive moment in an otherwise tense north London derby.
The goal was greeted by mass celebrations on and offline. Amid the delight on social media, one supporter dropped a readily prepared graphic, almost immediately after the ball hit the net, which quickly went viral.
It showed Arsenal’s Premier League ‘goal’ animation, on a broadcasters’ score graphic, shooting Tottenham’s cockerel, as featured on their club badge, with a 19th-century style artillery gun – the Arsenal equivalent, with their crest’s cannon. It left the cockerel burnt, and the word ‘GOAL’ and the phrase ‘NL (North London) is red’ appeared.
It was well-timed. Such goal animations are a new thing this year. The Premier League have introduced them this season for every club.
But unsurprisingly, and sorry to spoil anyone’s fun with some Grinch-like fact-checking, this viral animation was not official.
It did, though, appear to trick many, including Arsenal great Ian Wright, who reposted it on Instagram that evening. As an Arsenal fan and ex-player, it must be hard to resist another pop at Spurs, whether genuine or not.
The animation seemingly first appeared on account @AFC_Ryyy on X and was picked up by several aggregators, chalking up thousands of interactions and views. The original post accrued 1.8 million views within 48 hours.
It made for an interesting case study of what can and can’t go viral.
In this day and age, information and misinformation, be they distorted words or images associated with sportspeople or wider news topics, are becoming more complex and persuasive. Wading through that mud of authenticity is a key part of the sphere of sports engagement online.
This piece of work in particular seemed to have the magic viral touch. So what is behind that? The Athletic sought some expert insight.
“I think about social media in the context of kind of a much larger time scale,” explains Aaron Dinin, PhD, a senior lecturing fellow of the faculty in the entrepreneurship programme at Duke University in the U.S. state of North Carolina.
“Most people think social media is some sort of new, world-changing thing that’s just happened. But the truth is it’s part of a much longer evolution of content, that’s been going on for thousands of years. You can trace a direct line from an ancient Greek epic to Mr Beast and current social media content.
“If you go back to ancient Greek rhetoric, Aristotle taught us these things called Ethos, Pathos and Logos. They are the core elements of persuasiveness. Ethos is credibility, Pathos is emotion and Logos is logic. But there was actually a fourth mode of rhetoric that Aristotle talked about that’s kind of become lost over time because there’s no good direct translation for it. The word is Kairos. Kairos means timing, but not timing in terms of how long something takes — timing in terms of when something happens.
“A huge part of success on social media is timing.”
“What’s happened is you got something that has great timing. If someone put this animation out, honestly, even a few hours later, it wouldn’t have been as effective. One of the most important things that makes something go viral on social media is relevance to the current cultural moment.
“Then it is how the algorithms take over. They judge what to share based on how people are engaging with a piece of content. So if this thing comes out and it’s got good timing, you’re going to get immediate likes, shares, reposts whatever, and that’s just going to feed the beast.”
The quality of the video also gives it an illusion of truth. When it is then picked up by more and more accounts with large followings, the authenticity aspect grows.
Separating truth from fiction on social media in this day and age can be like sifting between sugar and sand — or defending set pieces from a Tottenham perspective. Both information and visual imagery can be manipulated with increasing ease after impressive advances in artificial intelligence.
“To do something like this even five or six years ago would have taken just so much longer and more effort than it does now,” says Dinin. “This is the history of all technology. It’s something we’re really struggling with in the world right now.
“If you just zoom out a little on our historical moment, it’s only been a very short amount of time that we can easily send a moving image from one person to another. It used to be a really expensive thing to do. If you saw a video, a clip or a moving image, you would assume someone put a lot of money into it. So there’s no way that this would be cheap or inexpensive or lying to you.
“Now we’ve got this ability to send videos so easily and so quickly, the cost has gone down significantly, but our brains don’t adjust that fast. We don’t evolve that fast as a species.
“So what happens is we’re still in this kind of weird historical moment where we as humans put a lot of stock, a lot of faith, in video content. And that is very easy to trick us.”
This, of course, is much less harmful than the more serious types of fake news, although there is a copyright infringement aspect.
So what is the actual story of these new animations? Well, they were unveiled ahead of the new season by the Premier League and are tailored to each of the 20 clubs. The aim, for the Premier League, was to come up with a creative approach that fans would find authentic and entertaining.
Each team have an emblem or icon that is associated with them.
Arsenal’s one does include use of their cannon when the ball hits the opposition net, but in the official version it fires out the word ‘goal’, rather than obliterating a Spurs cockerel. Tottenham for their part, see the letter ‘o’ in ‘goal’ replaced by the football that is part of their badge. Other examples include a seagull flying across the animation when Brighton score (they are known as the Seagulls), and a fox tail swishing for a Leicester goal (Leicester are nicknamed the Foxes).
The designs were created by Premier League Productions, with the initial process to introduce them beginning back in the spring. The company worked with a design agency and went through 10 rounds of briefings and revisions before signing off on the designs at the end of July.
They are used on the Premier League’s international broadcast feeds, with the aim of offering partners around the world something innovative. They will be visible throughout the season.
To be clear, though, there are just 20 animations, and no game-tailored editions. Not yet, anyway…
(Top photo: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)