Everton have been forced into an embarrassing backtrack after their website mistakenly announced that the club had signed Argentinian star Juan Roman Riquelme. The article was supposed to be test data for a new website but it was accidentally published yesterday. The ‘news’ broke at 11.30am yesterday and was online for about an hour before the error was spotted. By that time internet forums had been flooded by messages from excited Evertonians.
A club spokesman said: “During uploading the new home page designs for the website, some test data was displayed for a very short period and immediately removed after it had been identified. Example data had been used during the testing process and this was unfortunately missed by our appointed web development company during the final upload.”
The spokesman added: “We have spoken to our suppliers to convey our complete dissatisfaction at the way this misinformation appeared and they have apologised to the club and Everton supporters who may have may have read the article.â€