The FIFA World Cup is not only Olympic in its format of every-four-years soccer competition, but it’s mega-olympic in its worldwide popularity, too, getting more viewers and attendees than the Olympic Games themselves. And during these popular periods do promotional items peak in sales ? t-shirts, banners, and anything that can bear a team logo sell like hotcakes.
One company’s foot in the game just got stubbed, however, and with a major, yet majorly funny, mistake. A mug series is supposed to include the names and pictures of each member of Britain’s Manchester United, the UK team competing in the ?14 World Cup.
The mug with the name of defender Chris Smalling, however, bears the photo of?Barack Obama!
That’s the real Chris Smalling on the right. And?they do sort of look alike, don’t they? But, still ? how could this happen? According to a distributor of the souvenir items, it was the error of a young apprentice of the producing company:
The apprentice claims that he used that well known search engine, Google, to source the pictures. The thing is he’s more of a rugby fan and not very clued up on football.? Suffice to say that when he Google image searched??Chris Smalling??he copied the first picture he liked the look of and the result was that the?President of the United States?has ended up on an England cup instead of the English defender.
No one has named?the company that made the error, aside from identifying?its general location as Dorset in southwest England.
The Barack Obama-as-Chris Smalling mug is now available for online purchase from UK site ?The Clearance Aisle? for only ?11.99. (That’s $20.34 in US dollars).
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