With a fabricated backstory describing a teenage prodigy on a web of blog postings, evidently created by different people, reports of the youth talent were ultimately published in a The Times article titled "Football's top 50 rising stars",[1][2] as well as in When Saturday Comes and Goal.com.
[3][4] As a means to establish credibility to the identity, the creators of the hoax planted text into Wikipedia articles and forged Associated Press reports.
[7] John Burns of The Sunday Times suggested that the Ó Conaire story was indeed the inspiration for the entire hoax, and that the prank, which also included a fake Moldovan newspaper titled Diario Mo Thon (Diary My Ass), was in effect a satire on the football transfer market.
[8] Brian Phillips, a blogger of Runofplay.com, described in an article for Slate the anatomy of the hoax,[2] featuring a testimony email of "the alleged hoaxer's lengthy explanation of the Bugduv-creation process".
[9] In 2017, Irish journalist Declan Varley revealed that he created Bugduv as a social experiment, frustrated by having to sieve through countless speculations about football transfers.