Meet the lawyer helping Premier League footballers delete embarrassing social media posts

“If I can persuade you to remove your smartphone from your sex life I’ve done a good job.”

It was not a conversation Matt Himsworth imagined he would be having with 16-year-old footballers when he was training to become a lawyer in the early 2000s, social media and instant picture messaging hadn’t been invented then, but it is a phrase he has become used to spinning, and it is one of the best pieces of advice — of many — he offers when he gives talks to players at Manchester City, Liverpool, Spurs, Chelsea, Watford, Wolves and many other clubs.

Matt is a founder and director of law firm Himsworth Scott, who, alongside a raft of other legal services, works with clubs, players and their families to warn them of the pitfalls of social media, which, if they are not careful, can quickly turn into vast chasms that swallow a promising reputation whole and spit it back out in pieces.

Whose job is it?

The auditing of social media remains a surprisingly grey area in football. An industry not short of money hasn’t quite worked out how to stop embarrassing posts or pictures emerging from many years ago, yet whose job it is to monitor and manage isn’t entirely clear either. The agents? The clubs? The football associations? The players themselves?

In the increasingly sanitised world of Premier League football, with stage-managed interviews and many social accounts controlled by PRs, where players are painstakingly made to look like the saints they probably aren’t, we still see Declan Rice’s pro-IRA messages emerge on the eve of his England debut.

This, less than three years after striker Andre Gray was forced to apologise for homophobic tweets from 2012, when he played for non-league Hinckley United, emerging after he joined Burnley and started scoring in the Premier League. And less than two years after it took i to reveal a series of sexist posts by Phil Neville on the eve of him being announced as manager of England’s women’s team (I gather the Football Association believed they had done a sufficient social media audit before his appointment, but hadn’t found them).

Do a tidy up

“For every Declan Rice there are probably 10 other players who have worked with agents or clubs to delete or do a ‘tidy up’, as we call it,” Himsworth says. His firm do extensive work with top clubs — regular education sessions with players of all ages — but explore below that level and, he says, it is surprising how much remains un-edited, or untidy. “The younger generations aren’t really using Facebook, so they tend to gravitate towards Twitter or more likely Instagram now.”

Instagram can be tricky. A quick scan of the photo-sharing app revealed a phone number attached to Trent Alexander-Arnold’s account (it is not, I’m told, his number) and personal email addresses for several players, one of which appears to be Callum Hudson-Odoi’s. Much bad can be done if a personal email address falls into the wrong hands.

Football is a ruthless sphere to enter and social media makes it even more instantaneous and merciless. Even in May 2013, goalkeeper Jack Bonham, now on loan at Bristol Rovers, found himself on the bench when Watford’s first-choice Manuel Almunia was injured in the warm-up ahead of playing Leeds United in the Championship. By 62 minutes, remarkably, he was on, in place of injured No 2 Jonathan Bond, and was at fault for two Leeds goals which cost them the game and an automatic promotion place. During the mere 28 minutes he played, fans had already started posting online screenshots of his Wikipedia page saying how unimpressive it was and shared a photo from his Instagram account sticking his tongue out.

Saving from embarrassment

Himsworth has to protect the anonymity of those he helps, obviously, but he has plenty of recent examples to share. There was a player under consideration for a move to a Premier League club in January who asked Himsworth Scott to look into his Twitter account, from which he had posted more than 9,000 times. The player had no reason to believe there was anything inflammatory there, but he’d had the account throughout his teenage years and simply did not know what was lurking.

You can’t scroll through more than 3,200 tweets — and you will be lucky to reach that point without your computer freezing — but people can still access old ones using an advanced search. Himsworth’s team bulk deleted and left the player with a year’s worth.

A young player who made their Premier League debut this season also had his social media audited and they discovered some posts that would have embarrassed him from an account he no longer had access to, so they were erased.

‘Chat shit get banged’

And that can be another issue. The average teenager has at least one social media account they no longer have access to — set up with an old email address for which they no longer know the password. Some players may know of potentially embarrassing past posts, but be unable to do anything about it. Twitter and Facebook are particularly difficult to work with, but with money and a team of lawyers behind you it can be done.

And so it turns out that Jamie Vardy’s infamous “Chat shit get banged” tweet, written in 2011 in the raw, less scrutinised non-league world, was surprisingly prescient for the latest generation of emerging players.

If they chat shit, inevitably they will, by someone with too much time on their hands, get banged.