Werner laughs off YouTube story
Tom Werner today laughed off suggestions that Liverpool had bought Stewart Downing on the back of a YouTube video.
"Someone told me about this," said the Reds chairman. "It's a great story, but unfortunately for the person who wrote the piece, it isn't true. It actually comes from an interview I did five months ago with Ian Ayre for our club TV channel in which I said that when we first talked about signing Stewart, we'd found a video of him kicking footballs into some trash cans.
"I explained in that interview back in August we knew the footage had been doctored but I guess that detail doesn't really help stand up the story.
"The amount of people involved and the work that goes into a signing a player is huge so the suggestion that we'd buy someone on the back of one doctored video is ridiculous.
"The story that a hoax video caused us to buy a player is more of a hoax than the video. John and I don't get involved in choosing footballers to acquire."