English soccer team apologizes for awarding raffle prize to fake person
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A soccer team in England has been forced to apologize after fans realized the winner of a team-sponsored raffle didn’t exist.
Chesterfield F.C., a third-tier team in the East Midlands, ran a raffle offering a fan the chance to travel with the club to its training camp in Hungary.
Tickets went on sale in May at £20 a piece and a winner was supposed to be selected on June 7. According to a fan named Jonno Turner, fans on a message board thought something was fishy when no winner was announced.
Eventually the team announced that the winner was James Higgins from Surrey, a three-hour drive from Chesterfield. But when another fan traveled to Hungary and saw no sign of Higgins, fans started asking questions.
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Higgins fell ill and wasn’t able to travel with the club, the team said. Because Higgins couldn’t make it, the team offered a refund to those who purchased tickets “as a gesture of goodwill.”
That’s where things get really weird. Four days later, the club posted a statement that it had discovered the result of the raffle “was not legitimate and the information supplied to the club's communications department had clearly been falsified.” There was no James Higgins.
Perhaps the worst part is that only four people entered the raffle in the first place.
