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Richard Spencer watched Februarys Super Bowl between the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots in Whitefish, Montana, at his mothers house. The avowed white nationalist and a leader of the alt-right movement, Spencer was hoping to see something he could use to rile up his 50,000 Twitter followers. Maybe halftime performer Lady Gaga would wear an American flag hijab or make some other progressive political statement. She didn't oblige. So Spencer started to tweet about the Patriots.

Though they play in deep-blue Massachusetts, the Patriots had already come to be associated with Donald Trump. There's the flag-waving name, for one thing. Then the Make America Great Again hat found in quarterback Tom Bradys locker. Team owner Robert Kraft was Trumps good friend. And Trump read a letter at a campaign rallyYour leadership is amazingthat he received from head coach Bill Belichick.

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Spencer was a Trump supporter, but for him, the Patriots were more than just the presidents team. When he watched the Patriots, he could see a white quarterback, Brady, pass to a trio of wide receivers who were also white: Julian Edelman, Chris Hogan and Danny Amendola. Rooting for the Pats! he tweeted, with the Patriots trailing 28-3. 1/ Belichick & Brady support Trump 2/ Three White widereceivers (sic) 3/ Consistently NFL's whitest team 4/ ATL is dreadful.

The Patriots then staged the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. Spencer was giddy, and a flurry of tweets followed, punctuated by a GIF of Bradywho Spencer called an Aryan Avatarkissing his German-Brazilian supermodel wife, Giselle Bundchen, with the caption, For the White race, its never over. Spencer got the response he was looking for. Most fans were horrified, while his supporters retweeted him thousands of times. David Duke even chimed in.

Spencer's tweets became a troubling sideshow to the dramatic win. Appalled fans tweeted that he had sucked the joy from the Patriots victory. By the next morning, Boston Magazine, the New York Daily News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and others ran items chronicling Spencers tweets. For Spencer, the rampant denunciations only added to his pleasure. It was like the alt-right won the Super Bowl, Spencer told me recently.

On Wednesday, the Patriots are scheduled to appear at the White House, the first championship team Trump will host. And when the president stands with the team for their photo op, there will be no shortage of competing political messages. Since the Super Bowl, which was played 16 days after the inauguration, several playersmost notably Devin McCourty and Chris Longhave announced that they will not make the trip for political reasons. (They participated in a video recently discussing their decision.) The Patriots, and the NFL, too, have found themselves unavoidably linked with a divisive political moment. The league will sell patriotism, Trump will sell himself as a winner, and the absent players will be hailed by the Trump resistance. Spencer expects to be tweeting, too, capitalizing again on the opportunity for attention. After all, it worked so well the last time.

But for Spencer, theres a twist: He was actually wrong about his charge. The Patriots aren't the whitest team in the NFL. The team couldn't exactly leap to its own defensenobody wants to start publicly sorting players by race, for one thing. (The Patriots did not respond to a request for comment.) Statistics dont bear Spencer out. Still, the way the incendiary message came to divide fans anyway, and to stain the Patriots, speaks volumes about the power of confirmation bias, opportunism and the power of online trolling in the time of Trump. And it has exposed a truth about sports often glossed over by talk of athletic meritocracy being the great social equalizer: In fact, sports, because of its paramount presence in American culture, is uniquely susceptible to those who want to use it for political purposes.

Why do you rob a bank? asked ESPN radio and TV host Bomani Jones, who has written extensively about race and sports. Because thats where the money is. If you want to get a message out, the NFL is where the eyeballs are.

***

Politics, at first, were very good to the Patriots. It was a raw moment in American historyjust five months after 9/11when Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl. The Patriots were two-touchdown underdogs against the St. Louis Rams, and after the upset, Kraft famously proclaimed, Today, we are all Patriots. Something about the win felt ordained by fatea wounded America proudly prevailing over adversity.

But as the Patriots came to dominate the NFL, the team stopped seeming like good guys. Even before the associations with Trump, the team came to be seen as skirting the edges of the rules, and sometimes crossing them, as when it illicitly filmed opponents. And Brady served a four-game suspension last season for Deflategate, the melodrama over footballs that may or may not have been illegally tampered with.

Along the way, the Patriots also gained an odd reputation for having white receivers on their rosters. (The majority of star wide receivers, like most defensive backs, are black.) Most shrugged it off as a quirk, noting the Patriots were good at finding hidden value from all kinds of players. It was mostly chuckled about by sports writers, Jones said. Like, ha-ha, the Patriots have some white pass catchers.

But others fed the narrative. Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock, who is African-American, described a Patriots playoff game against the Baltimore Ravens in 2012 as a contest soaked in the white-black racial component that has driven American sports passion. Brady, he wrote, leads an offense built in his image. In a league that is predominantly black, Brady directs a high-flying offense that is predominantly white and relies on a deep cast of white playmakerstight end Rob Gronkowski, wide receiver Wes Welker and running back Danny Woodhead. Bradys chief adversary, Whitlock continued, was the Ravens defensive legend, Ray Lewis, who leads a defense built in his brash image. Nine of the 11 Ravens defenders are African-American.

Whitlock professed to be stating something as obvious and innocuous as the fact that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird had a great rivalry in 1980s. But he wasnt the only one who noticed. Spencer, whose white nationalist views were evolving, noticed, too. He was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and though he grew up in Texas a Dallas Cowboys fan, he paid attention to the Patriots. In alt-right circles, he discussed the Patriots rosters with friends. He read pieces on a website called Caste Football, which celebrates white athletes and dissects the racial makeup of college and pro teams. A piece on the site about Deflategate even positioned the controversy as a race-based attack on New England: The Patriots represent an example of white men being successful. And that just can't happen in a league whose sole purpose to the media-government-corporate complex is to provide highly publicized and constantly promoted examples of successful black men.

For Spencer, who believes minorities in America are dispossessing white ethnic Europeans of their country, sports provided a perfect venue to examine the oppression of whites: Why werent there more white football and basketball players? In the early days of his first webzine, Alternativeright.com, he wrote a piece that put the hatred of Duke basketball in racial terms (Spencer was a doctoral student in European intellectual history at Duke). People love to hate the Dukies because they stand as a flagrant violation of the trajectory of college and professional basketball over the past 30 years, he wrote. Duke is white, they play white, and they win.

When I met Spencer recently at a cafe in Alexandria, Virginia, he used a pseudonym to order coffee because, as he put it, the hippies and yoga-pant wearing women would be attacking me. He then explained that people responded to his Super Bowl tweets because they had touched on an unspoken racial angst. What the alt-right does is find the pressure point and bring it to the fore, Spencer said. I do think there is an element of white consciousness when fans watch Julian Edelman score a touchdown.

Because of the ties to Trump and because of the Patriots roster, it was easy, Spencer said, for people to follow his logicand react to it. It was similar to when the alt-right glommed onto the Trump campaign, or what happened a few weeks after the Super Bowl when Spencer called Depeche Mode the official band of the alt-right (the band publicly distanced itself from Spencer).

The idea is to take a kernel of truth and transform it, Spencer said. That comment doesnt work if I say Bob Marley is the band of the alt-right, just like the Super Bowl doesnt work if I say the Falcons are the team of the alt-right. A smile spread across his face. Its because people were already thinking about raceconsciously or subconsciouslythat we turned the Super Bowl into a propaganda bonanza, he said.

***

Dr. Richard Lapchick is a lifelong activist in the world of sports. His father, Joe, helped integrate the NBA when he was the coach of the New York Knicks, and in the 1970s, Lapchick spearheaded a campaign to fight apartheid by keeping South Africa out of international sporting events. In 1978, several men attacked him and carved the N-wordmisspelled with one ginto his abdomen with a pair of scissors. When I asked Lapchick about Spencer and the Patriots, he said sports have long been a venue for racial progress, and he commended players like Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James for using their platform to speak out. But he also acknowledged that the platform cuts two ways. In this case, players are being manipulated by outside forces, he said, referring to alt-right supporters like Spencer. They are being co-opted, and its not fair.

Today, Lapchick is a professor at the University of Central Floridas business school, where he publishes an annual racial and gender report card for all the major professional leagues. His agreement with the league prevents him from sharing team-by-team data from his NFL reports, but he said that by the numbers, the Patriots did not stand out as a white team. What I can tell you is that if you follow the Patriots over the years, their percentage of African-Americans is consistent with the league, he said.

Determined to figure out whether the kernel of truth that Spencer was talking about actually exists, I called David Berri, a sports economist at Southern Utah University. In 2009, Berri published a study that found some black quarterbacks were underpaid relative to their white counterparts. With some guidance from Berri, I used rosters from ProFootballReference.com to create an unofficial census for the NFL. By my rough count, Minnesota, Green Bay, Cincinnati and Cleveland had the most white players; the majority of teams, including the Patriots, had between 15 and 20. (The rosters I used typically listed around 60 players.)

I called Spencer to deliver the news. Really? he asked, his voice registering a twinge of disappointment. He first wanted to know which team was the whitest, but he then quickly wondered whether he could still make his claim for the Patriots by going back through all of the Belichick years. I explained Lapchicks work and his promise that there was no year-over-year trend.

I then told Spencer that, according to my census, the Falcons had nearly the same number of white players last season as the Patriots. Thats funny, Spencer said. The perception of Atlanta was much different. He suggested that white wide receivers are significant because theyre more noticeable than a white place kicker or a punter. You have Edelman and Hogan and Brady, a very handsome, Trump-supporting quarterback with a beautiful wife, he said. Sometimes prominence can outweigh the average.

As the information continued to sink in, Spencer seemed almost surprised by the power of his own Super Bowl tweets. The fact is I tweeted things and they resonated for a reasonno one questioned them, he said.

Certainly, the timing of the Super Bowl played a role: Trump was still freshly installed in the White House, and Americas political nerves were frayed on both sides. Two Sundays before, millions across the countryfrom Washington to Boisemarched to protest Trumps inauguration. Less than a week later, Trump introduced his first travel ban for seven majority-Muslim nations, which brought thousands more protesters to airports. As the game approached, racial tensions and tensions over Trump seemed to weave together, and Spencer exploited the moment. Teams you root for speak to your identity, Jones said, noting also that the Patriots were a ripe target for nonpolitical reasons, too. Theres a whole lot of people who hate the Patriots and want anything to throw against them.

Wednesdays visit at the White House will likely be a laudatory affair, with Trump heaping lavish praise on his favorite team. But the politics of the moment will be impossible to miss, even as Brady announced he would skip the visit, citing family reasons (He also thanked Trump for his support of the Patriots). The majority of the players who have announced they are skipping the trip to Washington because of their opposition to the Trump administration are black, which, in an unfortunate bit of irony, could make the Patriots appear slightly whiter alongside Trump. I feel bad for them, Jones said. You win the Super Bowl and Richard Spencer jumps up and says this is our team. What do you do? Then he had a thought: The Patriots third-string quarterback, Jacoby Brissett, is black (he started two games last season). You know, theyre a Jimmy Garoppolo trade and a Tom Brady injury from starting a black guy instead of Brady.

Ben Strauss is the co-author of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, winner of the 2017 PEN/ESPN award for literary sports writing.

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The Alt-Right's Favorite Team Visits the White House - POLITICO Magazine

This past weekend our great nation once again sat back and rooted for injuries on the far ends of both sides of the political spectrum, as Tax Day protestors clashed with pro-Trump supporters in theda Starbucks-ridden, gentrified urban wastelands of Berkeley, again.

Your challengers? On the left: the black-masked, hoodie-clad, spoke-roach brigade of Antifa: a far left, anarchist, communist whateverist campus movement hellbent on proving Trump right about everything. On the right: Alt-Right memelord weekend warrior Trump supporters in batting cage helmets and American flag capes, arriving to do battle, while most likely lying to their wives that they were just stepping out to Home Depot for a bit.

Fists were thrown; Americas leading Mindset Expert was gently fondled; tear gas was dispersed and Pepsi offered. News helicopters captured footage of Antifa and the Pepe Army playing Red Rover with what must have been a super-entitled dumpster that needed to check its privilege.

While these weekend skirmishes are humorous to most, great for the window-replacement business, and fine for the cops getting paid overtime, I cant help but step back and wonder why exactly these two sides of hot pocket warriors are doing battle with each other. They agree with each other on almost everything.

While stipulating that the glaring difference is America for Americans plastered over a big beautiful wall vs. a rainbow saturated pan-racial utopia, thats not what these campus protest soires are strictly about. This all basically boils down to which group of misfits has control of the Twitter-conch at any given moment. But ideologically speaking? These are two groups throwing comically weak punches at one another without stopping to realize that they believe in almost the exact same policies.

Healthcare? Antifa college activists fall in line right behind Grandpa Bernie Sanders in advocating universal government paid healthcare for allwhich happens to be the exact same position taken byDonald Trump (both during the campaign, and after theAHCA fallout). This has been known as far back as 2015. Several thought leaders of the new alt right endorse single payer healthcare as well.

Not two weeks ago, both sides also found themselves aligned on the issue of bombing Syria. The conductors of the Trump Train oppose foreign intervention with the proclamation America First, while the far left sees Trump as another Hitler W. Bush, bombing the browner peoples of the world to juice his approval ratings and personally enrich the family wealth. Both believe in a strong patrimonial government, as embodied by a powerful federal bureaucracy.One side believes government is their all-providing Father. The other calls it Daddy.

Which brings us to the core issue of speech and the freedom or limits thereof. But one group is about shutting down free speech! No, silly normie, actually both are. Antifa manifests their anti-speech authoritarianism on college campuses against speakers they dont like (or whoever the groups they follow on Facebook tell them not to like). The alt-right attempts to bury anyone online who dares speak out against their God-Emperor on social media, while simultaneously celebratinghis musings about the need to re-examine First Amendment U.S. libel law.

Furthermore, both sides manifest their strong political emotions into physical aggression. Antifa doesnt like Milo Yiannopoulos coming to speak? Sweet: trash some buildings, start some fires, show the colors! Chest thumping alpha male gorilla mind is a staple of the MAGA Mindset. During the campaign, several instances of violence broke out at Trump rallies, when the candidate egged on the crowd from the stage. Antifa pepper sprayed a girl in a hat that read Make Bitcoin great again, mistaking it for a Trump MAGA hat. A Trump supporter this past weekend lobbed a punch at a female Antifa activist he, in all probability, thought was a guy. This week a Trump supporter who assaulted a protestor is now suing Trump, claiming Trump made him do it. Good luck with that.

It may simply come down to this: Parties do not exist anymore. There is no left vs right. We are grunting pockets of enclaves and Twitter lists and one side may not like anotherany more simply because of the letter they wear on their chest. Tribalism rules all, even if that tribe sees eye to eye with your tribe.

Antifa activists may look at Trump and see some of the worst authoritarian impulses they and their idols of literature also possess (Their name Antifa is borrowed from Anti-Facism Leninists of the Bolshevik movement, of which Steve Bannon reportedly was also a fan). Spartan helmet wearing MAGA Warriors may look at how the media romanticizes movements of the far left like Black Lives Matter, Occupy and Antifa, and decided they want in on the adulation and the action. Some claim to just be tired and want pushback, but pushback againstwhat? Antifa is torching their own campuses and their own cities.

Whatever it is, both sides ought to take heed of advice from the Gipper himself: The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally not a 20 percent traitor. Both sides should pump the breaks on the fist throwing and share a Pepsi with their young fellow statists.

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Why Are Antifa And The Alt Right Doing Battle? They Agree on ... - Heat Street

Last week, Burger King unleashed an ad that angered the collective internet and one of the internets biggest names by designing a commercial that would intentionally trigger viewers Google Home devices, directing them to the Wikipedia page for the Whopper sandwich. Google responded swiftly by amending Home to no longer respond to the ads prompt: What is the Whopper burger? And now, it looks like Google wasnt the only one angered by the experiment.

Wikipedia has now posted an open letter to Burger King, accusing the brand of editing its Wiki page to include advertising, marketing, or promotional material, which is against the websites rules. The letter continues: Our terms of use require all paid editors to prominently post the fact that they are paid, the person or company paying them, and any other relevant affiliations, a possible reference to an update by a user called Fermachado123 (a name that closely mirrors that of Fernando Machado, BKs head of brand marketing).

Wikipedia also had some choice words for Eaters sister site the Verge, which in its reporting of the stunt, inserted incorrect information on the Burger King Wiki to see if Google Home would read the wrong information. (It did.) Wikipedia is asking for an apology to its editors and readers from all involved.

Wikipedia: Conflict of Interest/Noticeboard open letter [Wikipedia] Google Was Not Okay With That Burger King Ad [E] Burger Kings New Ad Forces Google to Recognize the Whopper [The Verge]

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Wikipedia Is the Next Internet Giant to Be Mad at Burger King - Eater

Business The slow demise of Wikipedia Zero on the subcontinent deserves greater attention from policy makers and public alike.

Wonderful would be the day when the sum of all human knowledge is available to everyone without restrictions or barriers. It would not be much of a stretch to say that all modern notions of freedom espouse this view. Wikipedia Zero, I believe, is a step in this direction. The Wikimedia Foundation (the not-for-profit foundation that maintains Wikipedia and affiliated projects) seeks to increase the availability of Wikipedia by enrolling telecommunication partners in various countries who allow access to it free of cost. The partners do this by designating Wikipedia as zero-rated on their networks.

On March 25, 2017, Ncell, a privately owned mobile operator network, terminated its Wikipedia Zero service. This effectively means that in Nepal, there is now no way to access the online encyclopedia without incurring data charges. The situation is similar in India although it is now explicitly prohibited by the countrys net neutrality laws. Uninor briefly provided access to Wikipedia Zero in India but with its merger and demise the service was terminated.

India and Nepal are now both absent amongst the the list of countries with access to Wikipedia Zero.

When an Internet Service Provider (ISP) designates an application or website as zero rated, it means that they are not adding the traffic originating in that websites direction to the users bill. The question is why would an ISP designate anything as zero rated? This is a very valid question given current capitalistic tendencies. One reason is that perhaps the ISP or telecom operator believes it would attract customers amongst whom the zero rated service is popular. Another popular rationale is if a well-heeled company can pay the telecom operator to provide free access to people in an effort to promote their services. Extrapolating from the above conjecture, some have suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation, by lobbying for access to Wikipedia Zero is condoning practices that run countercurrent to the idea of net neutrality.

Right off the bat I would like to point out that a majority of zero-rating practices employed by massive corporations are dangerous because of their effect on net neutrality. They put small and emerging developers at a disadvantage.

The net neutrality defence, however, is also an overzealous criticism of Wikipedia Zero. There is a fundamental difference between a not-for-profit organisation (WikiMedia) staffed by around 280 people lobbying for access to a global, relatively transparent, user-generated encyclopedia vs a for profit corporation (such as Facebook) staffed by 17,000 people, playing the pied piper to entice users into signing up so that their data can be harvested and sold.

Wikipedias intent is to facilitate learning, while Facebook Zero undeniably stifles net neutrality by attempting to crowd out talent by brute force. Attempting to outdo smaller companies by innovating is healthy but using the brute force of money is dubious at best. The Wikimedia foundation lists not exchanging payment as one of its operating principles for Wikipedia Zero. Looked at it this way, the developer of a new social networking site would face unfair disadvantage due to the data charges required in a region where Facebook Zero lurks this is in sharp contrast to the proliferating number of wiki-based projects.

Importance of Wikipedia in Nepal

It is important to note that the moment there are no net neutrality laws in Nepal nothing of the kind that prohibits Wikipedia Zero in the country. However, debate and discussion is slowly starting, centred, much like India, around the dangers of free Facebook access.

Alexa currently rates Wikipedia as the 12th most visited website in Nepal. In a country where only one-third of the population is connected to the Internet this underscores a definite thirst for the most essential of resource, knowledge. The World Bank estimates that around 25% of the population lives below the poverty line in Nepal. So, even if a quarter of the population is living below the poverty line and one third of the population is plugged into the great web then there is a demonstrable need for this service. Additionally, since Wikipedia was adding more visual content, the same articles would now be more data intense if viewed in their entirety.

As a student who has used Wikipedia extensively for primary research and had to cross-check the data before using it, I can say that the information is mostly reliable and is consistently improving. Recently, an animation house called Osmosis teamed up with Wikipedia to provide free drawn-cum-animated videos for quite a few medical topics. Here is a video explaining diabetes produced by Osmosis and made available on Wikipedia.

Although the content is targeted at a small population of medical students, the underlying financial model is worth taking note of. These videos are a boon for most of the students in my college and has helped many understand and memorise things better by providing a memory template. It is reasonable to expect the spread of this trend. I would like to add a caveat though that information on Wikipedia should never be used before verifying from appropriate primary sources. Wikipedia is not the best source of information it can certainly never replace formal education. However, it is one of the better sources.

The point I am trying to underscore here is that Nepal uses Wikipedia extensively and any action that reduces access to it is regressive. Corporations such as NCell, the only telecommunication provider who once provided access to Wikipedia Zero, should perhaps consider this.

Events such as this point to a larger disinterest in the utility of Internet beyond the most basal needs of instant communication and provision of consumer services. A report released around the October of 2016 claimed that most of the search engine queries arising from the free WiFi provided at Patna Station in Bihar were related to pornography. This point is raised not as a segue to prudish platitudes but to highlight the absence of awareness about the potential of the Internet itself.

Curiosity, of some sort, any sort, is the common strand uniting our disparate lives. This innate hunger for knowing is channelised by wiki-based projects. People want to enhance their knowledge of the entity about whom they possess curiosity, this can range from the net worth of some actor to the history of physics. Wikipedia provides a way to not only aid this acquisition of knowledge but also encourages a user to become a contributor, in the process engaging with others in a constructive and respectful manner, guided by general principles.

The concept of a wiki eschews established norms of behaviour and engagement such as those defined by hierarchy, caste and other biases in favor for a system that rewards rationality and consensus building through review. This is resonant with the ideal functioning of a democracy and one could even argue that our children should learn such a model of collaboration.

Free data, free information

India ranks poorly in number of Wikipedia edits originating within its borders. It will definitely take some time before we reach a point where children are encouraged to locally develop wiki projects from a young age. That however makes the issue of Wikipedia Zero even more pertinent.

Such technologies can also be used to aid governance. It would be feasible to allocate dedicated spectrum for certain functions. For example spectrum could be dedicated to aiding government programs dealing with maternal health. Expecting mothers could be provided access to articles, videos and other multimedia content in their local language, that has been scientifically curated, thus enabling them to better understand and protect their health. This might help bridge the unacceptably huge knowledge gap between India and Bharat.

In a country where infant mortality due to diarrhoea is still a huge public health menace and exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months not a norm, such knowledge based interventions could have a significant impact. It is one thing to advise someone about using ORS or benefits of exclusive breast feeding but enabling them to view a variety of digital content explaining the rationale behind the advice is another. By engaging the curiosity of the individual for whom the intervention is intended we turn her into a emboldened stakeholder who is far more likely to adhere to advice than a passive recipient.

These are but just a few hypothetical applications. Wikimedia also has many other projects such as Wikibooks, Wikitravels and so on. Talking about all of which is beyond the scope of this article but I am listing them because I have used these as well and found them to be very enabling. I learnt the basics of 3-D modelling using the Wikibooks on blender, which was a very enabling experience.

It makes sense to increase access to such evolving repositories of knowledge. The possibilities are endless and the irony is that instead of taking a step forward we just took one backwards. Countries like India and Nepal are full of upwardly mobile youth who are restless and hungry for ideas, who wish to see a change and are willing to work towards it.

Stifling such a wonderful force by refusing to remove or even acknowledge barriers to information would be an unimaginable loss. The slow demise of Wikipedia Zero on the subcontinent should be afforded greater attention by policy makers and public alike.

Shwetank Singh iscurrently studying at the B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences in Dharan, Nepal.

Categories: Business, Digital, Featured

Tagged as: Facebook, Free Basics, information search, Ncell, Nepal, Nepal Telecom, net neutrality, not-for-profit, telecom service provider, Wikpedia Zero, zero-rated service, zero-rating

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As Nepal's Ncell Shuts Access to Wikipedia Zero, What Next For Information Without Barriers? - The Wire

Its fair to say that referee Viktor Kassai wont be welcome in Munich anytime soon.

The Hungarian ref made a series of baffling decisions which ultimately cost Bayern Munich a place in the Champions League semi-final.

Firstly, he failed to send off Casemiro despite the Brazilian making numerous late challenges whilst already on a yellow card.

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He then incredibly sent off Arturo Vidal when it appeared he had produced a good tackle on Marco Asensio.

Then, in extra-time, Cristiano Ronaldo profited from two dodgy offside calls to score twice and take the tie away from their German opponents.

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While Kassai cant be blamed for allowing Ronaldos goals to stand - the assistant referees are to blame for that - that didnt stop one angry football fan from editing his Wikipedia page.

The first line of his individual page now reads: Viktor Kassai is a Hungarian football referee who currently plays for Real Madrid.

Very funny.

With the help of the officials, Madrid marched onto the semi-finals of the competition once again thanks to a hat-trick from Ronaldo and a late Asensio strike.

The tie has been taken into extra-time, though, after Robert Lewandowskis penalty and a calamitous own goal from Sergio Ramos sandwiched a Ronaldo header during the 90 minutes.

But, just before the final whistle, Vidal received his marching orders for a decent looking tackle.

And if playing an extra 30 minutes with 10 men was hard enough, the Bavarians werent helped with the assistant referee failing to see Ronaldo standing a couple of yards offside when he made it 2-2 on the night from Ramos pass.

Ronaldo then completed his hat-trick but, once again, was in an offside position when Marcelo squared the ball to him.

There was nothing wrong with Asensios strike, though, which made sure Madrid joined their city rivals, Atletico, in the last-four of the competition.

We doubt Kassai will be reffing another match in Europes elite competition this season, though.

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Referee Viktor Kassai's Wikipedia page trolled after his display during Real Madrid v Bayern Munich - GiveMeSport