THE BLOG BY CPD FOOTBALL | The World of Indian football and beyond by Chris Punnakkattu Daniel

Borussia Dortmund NOT interested to sign India star Sunil Chhetri

Sunil Chhetri and Borussia Dortmund

Sunil Chhetri and Borussia Dortmund

Indian football fans are getting excited as various Indian media report about Borussia Dortmund’s alleged interest to sign India star striker Sunil Chhetri. But there is NO truth to these reports!

Fans have been flooding me with messages via eMail, Facebook and Twitter, if these reports are true and “when Sunil will be travelling to Germany”. But I have to disappoint all fans who have been already on their way to buy a Borussia Dortmund jersey with Sunil’s name on it!

The reports in India are based on an article [+ click here] which has been published by German football magazine “RevierSport” on their website two days ago. The author of the article, Stefan Schinken, reported about Dortmund’s new Armenian signing Henrikh Mkhitaryan and the new rising interest in the German side in Mkhitaryan home country.

The article is focused on the marketing aspect of Mkhitaryan’s deal with Borussia Dortmund as the club witnessed a huge increase of new fans from Armenia. The report says that one in five views of the FC Basel vs Borussia Dortmund friendly live streaming was from Armenia, while Dortmund’s various social media and onlie plattforms are getting massive traffic from Mkhitaryan’s compatriots.

Talking about the interest from Armenia and other potential strategic signings, Stefan Schinken suggests that Dortmund should have a thought to sign Sunil Chhetri, if it’s so easy to get new fans in other countries.

“The question arises whether it is really so easy to draw the attention of an entire country to a club. If yes, BVB should maybe take promising Sunil Chhetri under contract. The 28-year-old striker, who currently plays for the reserves of Sporting Lisbon would cost the club less than €1m, is popular in his country and in 61 international matches scored an impressive 36 goals – for India! There are waiting around 1.25 billion (!) potential BVB fans,” Stefan Schinken wrote in his article.

Nothing more and nothing less! Sadly various Indian media and fans reading some Google translations made a headline out of it and they reported that Borussia Dortmund is interested to sign Sunil! But again: There is NO truth to these reports from India!

I criticised the way some people publish their news a while ago [+ click here], but I would like to commemorate the same as we face such reports again and again.

Here is my statement from June 12, 2012:

I need to criticise the way many people publish news nowaday with the only aim to create some hype. And I need to honestly say that I’m even more shocked to see people believing such “news” again and again and again without cross-checking reliable sources!

Many of the readers, viewers and followers believe these wrong information and spread the same on places like Facebook and on their own blogs to further worsen the situation. Numbers of other fans read the posts and take it for granted.

I would like to appeal to everyone to recollect our human ability to challenge the news we read and to relearn the ability to differentiate the quality and reliability of a source.

We live in a world with access to the internet and other media and it an ease to use e.g. Google to cross-check the information we get.

We have become comfortable nowadays and prefer to get the news of the last 24 hours ideally in just one sentence on our Facebook wall. But let’s reactivate our instinct to learn and to use our brains once again in the aim to communicate proper information!