Robin van Persie fans turn IT consultant into a football star on Twitter

If you are even a little bit into football, then you would know that Manchester United recently won the English Premier League. One of the club’s most impressive players this season, Robin van Persie had a huge role to play in the title win. Fans thronged Twitter to congratulate the Dutch striker for his performance.

And since the forward is often called RVP by fans, they bombarded the Twitter handle @rvp with thousands of mentions. But if fans were hoping for a shout back from the footballer, they were in for a surprise. Turns out @rvp is not the footballer at all, but an IT and telecom consultant by the name of Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad, while van Persie’s actual Twitter account is @Persie_Official. @rvp was mentioned more than 10,000 times in the 24 hours after the match.

To his credit, Prasad was more than sporting about the spam tweets and even joked once or twice about the mistake. Here are some of his tweets about the miscommunications.

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Prasad sure does have a great sense of humour

Prasad didn’t lose his cool throughout the ordeal

Even after Prasad made it amply clear that he is not the footballer, the tweets kept coming, but many of them were light-hearted and made light of the situation. “Congratulations to @RVP you fully deserved it. Incredible since you are a part time footballer & info tech consultant. #CHAMPIONS2013," said one Twitter user.

“I’m a fan of Robin van Persie, so I understand people wanting to congratulate him, and most of the messages or mentions are nice. But it’s a real nuisance for me. I keep having to tell everyone I’m not Robin van Persie and blocking unwanted followers,” he told the BBC. Prasad said he spent around 10 hours blocking nearly 5,000 new followers who mistook him for the footballer after the football match.

The first tweet from @rvp about the spam tweets

He may not be a famous footballer, but Prasad does have a great sense of humour. Here’s another sample. “I am even older than Garry (sic) Neville, Ryan Giggs & Paul Scholes. Fergie, sign me up immediately for ManU’s Dad’s Army.”

Now that the ordeal is through, Prasad should count himself lucky. For someone with only 197 tweets, 3,626 followers is certainly great going. Just goes to show that even a mistake or a coincidence can bring you fame on Twitter.