Union Source Of Controversy (Again): Blatter Video Goes Viral

The Oxford Union has found itself caught in the crossfire, as a video from Sepp Blatter’s Friday address to the Oxford Union has gone viral amid an explosive international controversy.

Blatter’s speech to the Union initially received relatively modest coverage from the press, generating only a handful of small stories in national papers.

Then the Union uploaded a video on their YouTube channel of Blatter answering a question on which of football stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi he preferred.

Union President Parit Wacharasindhu and FIFA President Sepp Blatter, plotting to make an excessively-tanned Portuguese man very upset.

The upload caught the attention of Real Madrid, who took issue with what they saw as an insulting depiction of Ronaldo, and made a formal complaint.

Ronaldo then took to Twitter to attack Blatter – linking the Union video to his 21 million followers.

The video received 14,000 retweets in just a hour, and the video is rapidly gaining views, comments, and dislikes from angry Ronaldo fans.

Ronaldo has the 15th-most followers of all Twitter users. He’s only about 4 million behind Twitter’s Twitter account. Really.

This isn’t the first Union video to go viral – a dozen other videos on the page have over 100,000 views, including PSY’s address to the Union last year and several arguments from a controversial debate on whether Islam is a peaceful religion – but it looks set to become the most popular (or unpopular, as the case may be); a hour after the Ronaldo tweet, it’s already received 125,000 views, 1400 comments, and 2700 dislikes, with dozens of comments per minute.

Well, look at these fine, upstanding examples of debate and discussion.

The Union is no stranger to controversy – it’s already garnered national attention this turn alone for a protest at George Galloway’s speech and cancelling a talk by former EDL leader Tommy Robinson.

But with this new controversy set to grab international headlines, this looks set to be the biggest Union-sparked story in quite some time.

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