Jake Paul, a controversial YouTube star, has been invested in the success of Liverpool for more than a year now.
He has been in the news multiple times for a plethora of issues or headlines, ranging from neighbour complaints about noise to arguably being the face of the YouTube boxing scene.
Being the younger brother of an even more controversial YouTuber, Logan Paul, had put him in the spotlight since the two made content on Vine back in 2014.
Following Logan Paul’s Japan incident, Jake Paul has been the one carrying the name of the Paul family in popular media, for better or for worse.
His ongoing back-and-forth with British YouTuber-turned-rapper and boxer KSI has been the talk of the town for the better half of the past year now and could be the reason why Jake Paul has been interested in football in the first place.
KSI is a lifelong Arsenal fan, and one of the reasons why Jake Paul could have chosen Liverpool could be because of the fact that Liverpool have repeatedly beaten Arsenal in the past few years.
Hints of this can be seen in tweets where he mentions Arsenal for no visible reason, apart from the fact that his nemesis KSI supports them.
A lot could be said about him being a fan of the game. For instance, he only started watching Premier League football in 2021, and all of his tweets with predictions have been followed by replies mocking his lack of ball knowledge.
Jake Paul’s recent tweet has taken Football Twitter aback, adding to his reputation as a person who doesn’t really understand the game.
In the tweet, we can see Jake saying that he does not want Liverpool to beat Everton, calling them the “only team” he doesn’t mind NOT defeating.
This tweet was put out after the nil-nil draw between Liverpool and Everton on Saturday, and it’s safe to say this confused everyone who read the tweet, including BBC Sport themselves.
To make matters worse, when a popular football meme account StokeyyG2 pointed out that Everton are Liverpool’s rivals, Jake Paul replied by saying “exactly”. This makes us question if he understands what a rival is.
For the uninitiated, Liverpool and Everton share the same county in North Western England – Merseyside. The two clubs’ stadiums are separated by less than a mile, and can even be seen together in photographs.
For these clubs, beating each other signifies who the best club in Merseyside is, and the game is thus called the Merseyside Derby.
This makes Everton and Liverpool staunch rivals, even though Liverpool have been clearly more dominant in the game’s history.
However, going into the game, Liverpool and Everton are always out to prove a point.
Any fan worth his salt would want their team to beat their local rivals, no matter the context, no matter the circumstances. Local rivalries hit differently.
A through-and-through fan would allow a team to get beaten by other teams but never ever by local rivals.
It’s about bragging rights. It’s about who gets to laugh at their rival’s faces in the office the next day. It’s feisty. It’s what football is all about.
This is why Jake’s understanding of the word Rivals is perplexing – Do you even understand football if you do not want to defeat your rivals?
