by sussexpob » Fri Jun 25, 2021 9:07 am
Great story doing the rounds about Blackburn's Ben Brereton. At the start of the year he did a "meet the squad" story in a local Blackburn paper where they were asked to give a silly fact about themselves; Brereton's was that he thought he could technically play for Chile, as his mother was born there, a fact previously unknown. A game scout for the PC game Football Manager local to Blackburn caught the interview in his local paper and decided to change Brereton's nationality to half-Chilean on the game.
A few days later after the game was updated, some random Chilean social media guy managing them on the game was trawling through a list of players he could pick and found Brereton. Being a bit surprised he did research and found the exact same article where the player confirmed his mother was Chilean and that the player had been considered a very good prospect (for instance was a tournament top goal scorer for England Under-19s) and he decided to release a social media awareness campaign in Chile about the unknown, undiscovered half-Chilean playing in English football.
They released the story on SM on Friday night. The following day Brereton scored and assisted a goal v Preston North End, and over the weekend the story blew up in Chile. Within days all the papers were running features on the lad and calling the national team manager to pick him. Brereton started getting his own Instagram suddenly flooding with Chilean flags and comments in Spanish begging him to switch allegiances.
In the end, the Chile National Team selected him for the Copa America and he accepted to go out and play. He came off the bench the other day v Argentina and within seconds nutmeged ex-city centre back Otamendi. He started the next game and fired in the only game of the game, then assisted the Chile equaliser v Uruguay, turning a lot of heads on the way.
Weird how some things work out. I guess Yuppie might be a bit miffed... think he was rubbish for Notts Forest. He's even rebranded him name.... He's now Ben Brereton Diaz... sounds a little sexier.
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