Media, especially football media (YouTube and football twitter) is full of controversial takes and schoolboy mistakes when it comes to talking about players, especially famous ones.
In a Vibe With Five episode released on Youtube’s ‘Rio Ferdinand Presents FIVE’ channel earlier this week, Rio Ferdinand was joined by CheekySport Ltd founder and social media influencer Joel Beya, Manchester United YouTube Stephen Howson, and legendary former England Women international Fara Williams.
During the podcast, the quartet talked about Manchester United’s 0-3 loss against Bournemouth, manager Erik ten Hag’s struggles, whether his time as the United head coach was up, and how the team responded to crisis during Rio’s time.
Then, they talked about Liverpool, who are the league leaders in the Premier League with 37 points from 16 games, one point above Arsenal.
It’s impossible to talk about Liverpool without mentioning Mohamed Salah, the fifth-highest goal scorer in Liverpool history as he scored his 200th goal for the Reds in a 2-1 away win against Crystal Palace to move to 11 Premier League goals for the season and his 14th goal in all competitions.
The panel was discussing about Salah’s impact and where he ranked amongst all forwards in Liverpool history, which has seen players like Ian Rush, Fernando Torres, Robbie Fowler, and Luis Suarez, to name a few, gain legendary status at Anfield.
Rio was asked by Joel Beya who the greatest Liverpool forward in the Premier League was, to which Rio replied by choosing Salah.
Howson, who was seated beside Rio to his left, asked him who he thought was Liverpool’s greatest player ever. Rio, unsurprisingly, chose his former England teammate Steven Gerrard.
“Oh, shut up, Rio,” Howson replied in full disagreement with the former United defender. “He was a forward, he was a not a midfielder, was he?”, Howson added. Rio refuted Howson and backed his claim by saying, “His best season [for Liverpool] was as a No. 10 (central attacking midfielder).”
Fans who watched this video were quick to ridicule the YouTuber over his absurd comments stating that Gerrard was a forward and not a midfielder. Snippets of the video have now gone viral on X (formerly Twitter), with football fans going all guns blazing at Howson.
Many fans expressed their opinions on the utter absurdity of the claim by a YouTuber who should be expected to have basic knowledge such as knowing that Gerrard was never a forward but a midfielder who scored ample amount of goals.
Howson has over 250,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he mainly talks about the team he follows, Manchester United. He also talks about other teams and regularly uploads vlogs whenever he travels to different stadiums in the world.
For someone who has featured on big mainstream media outlets such as Sky Sports, BBC, Premier League TV, BT Sport, and Eleven Sport among a few more, it’s absolutely ludicrous how he addressed one of the greatest midfielders ever as a forward.
Whether in an attacking role or a defensive one or in his usual central spot, Gerrard was always a midfielder, as seen on this imagery by Transfermarkt –
Gerrard, currently managing Saudi Pro League outfit Al-Ittifaq, made his debut for Liverpool in 1998 and played his final game for the Reds in 2015, amassing 710 appearances to leave Anfield as the third-highest appearance maker. He also scored 186 goals, which puts him in sixth place in the list of Liverpool’s top goal scorers.
We can only hope that the rest of the panel corrected Howson after the podcast and gave him ample evidence of Gerrard being a midfielder to convince him to stop believing what he believed to be true hitherto.