IRELAND — A lower-level Irish soccer team apologized Tuesday for faking the death of one of its players in an apparent attempt to avoid an upcoming game.
According to Raidió Teilifís Éireann, a public broadcasting service in Ireland, Ballybrack FC falsely told officials with the Leinster Senior Football League that one of its players had died in a "traffic accident" on Thursday night. The league subsequently postponed Ballybrack's game on Saturday and held a moment of silence for the player at all of its other games over the weekend.
Then the league discovered that the player, Fernando LaFuente, was in fact alive.
LaFuente told RTE that his full-time employer, a software company, had simply relocated him from Dublin to Galway.
"I was aware there was going to be some story on me but I thought it was going to be me breaking a leg or something like that," LaFuente told RTE. "I was home yesterday after my work finished. I was playing some video games. ... (My colleagues) started sending me all these news articles and mass media. And that's how I found out I was dead."
Ballybrack apologized on Facebook for what it described as "a gross error of judgement" and announced that "the person in question has been relieved of all footballing duties."
Leinster Senior League chairman David Moran told RTE that the league was informed of LaFuente's false death Friday morning and began searching for further details. Then it learned that the supposedly deceased soccer player had flown back to his native Spain on Saturday.
"It's very extreme to get a game off," Moran told RTE. "We acted in good faith. We had a minute silence at the weekend for that young lad. It's absolutely ridiculous."
The league, which is in the third tier of Irish soccer, also released a statement saying it would "co-operate with all relevant agencies in the investigation of this matter" and punish the club internally for falsely reporting the tragedy.
