Despite claims to the contrary, all the evidence suggests Willian hasn’t recently removed Arsenal from his social media bios.
Every transfer window, it’s totally inevitable that someone will claim an Arsenal player has removed “Arsenal” from their Instagram bio, or their Twitter bio, or some other nonsense.
The thing about these claims is that they’re so difficult to verify. There’s no Instagram bio history on a player’s profile, so if you pick a player who doesn’t have Arsenal in their bio, you can say they removed it and most people will just assume you’re telling the truth.
This summer, it’s Willian. Metro ran a story today claiming “Arsenal flop Willian deletes club name from his Instagram profile”, and my guess is that they based the article on this Reddit post claiming “Willian has removed Arsenal from his Instagram bio (and yes, it was there before)”.
Only, the Redditor hasn’t provided a screenshot of Arsenal in Willian’s bio from before. There’s no link to an archive site showing it was there. The only source is “trust me, I saw it”.
I tried to do my own research, and I found a couple of screenshots of Willian’s profile in old articles and tweets from last season, both long after he joined Arsenal, neither with “Arsenal” in the bio.
Is it already time for another round of this lazy and irresponsible ‘journalism’?
I just spent a few minutes doing research and I can’t find a single screenshot showing Arsenal in his bio previously. Here are a couple without Arsenal from last season. https://t.co/THVYsbE1GS pic.twitter.com/LJ7RsINfFz
— Dan Critchlow (@afcDW) August 26, 2021
Can I say for certain that he never had “Arsenal” in his bio? No. But I’m yet to see a shred of evidence that he did, and if he did then he added it between December and the summer when he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular at the club. Let’s just say I doubt it.
This is one of many such instances of this kind of claim. In July 2019, it was Koscielny “adding” eye emojis when he was linked with a move away. In June 2020, David Luiz “removed” Arsenal from his bio. In December 2020, William Saliba “removed” Arsenal from his bio too.
In every case, the player hadn’t actually changed their bio. Someone just told a lie and everyone believed it because it was easier to believe than try and check whether it was true.
Again, I can’t say for sure Willian didn’t change his bio this month. There’s just no hard evidence at all to support the claim. Treat it with scepticism, and remember this next time you see someone saying something similar.