Masal Bugduv was a Moldovan maestro and the next great European prodigy. The 16-year-old striker was fielding feverish offers from Arsenal and Liverpool. His ceiling was high.  He even made 30th place in the Times of London’s Top 50 Rising Stars. There was one slight problem. He doesn’t exist.

Bugduv began with fake AP feeds, copied and pasted into blog comments sections, as well as a fake Wikipedia page. His existence then spread to blogs, and from blogs to a news site, Goal.com. His story moved to a magazine, When Saturday Comes, and finally to a newspaper website (before it was altered). At not one of these steps did a writer deign to independently confirm the kid’s existence.

It was a blogger, Fredorraci of SoccerLens, who uncovered the hoax by conferring with a Russian magazine editor after a comment left on the site.

Brian Phillips of Slate, reports that the hoaxer was probably an Irish newspaperman.

So, who was this clever hoaxer? Whoever engineered the prank left behind a calling card in the form of the fictional Moldovan newspaper Diario Mo Thon, described in one of the concocted AP stories as “the top sports daily in Balti.” Diario means diaryin several Romance languages, and mo thón is Irish for my ass—just the kind of nested, polyglot ass pun that every good imaginary-Moldovan prank requires.

It got better. After SoccerLens blogger McDonnell broke the story, Bugduv fans in Ireland noticed that the player’s name was a phonetic twin for m’asal beag dubh, which is Irish for “my little black donkey.” A second Irish ass pun, sure. But “My Little Black Donkey” is also the name of an Irish-language short story by early 20th-century writer Pádraic Ó Conaire. And the story, about a man tricked into overpaying for a lazy donkey based on some vivid village gossip, can be read anachronistically as a parody of the culture of soccer transfers, in which the flaming rings of hype around a player—about how good he is, where he might go, how much a club might pay for him—often seem to overwhelm the minor matter of what he does on the pitch.

The Masal Bugduv story allows us to titter at the lack of European journalistic standards, quite deservedly. Though, in an opaque environment where nearly every sports media outlet runs rumor mill gossip and reports deals as imminent which never take place and where talking heads dabble as much in the hypothetical as the tangible are we really that superior?