Like a bizarro David Beckham, anything that could go wrong for the Manchester United defender has tended to do just that
The straw that appears to have broken the camel’s back could scarcely have been more innocuous. On the first Sunday of October 2017, Phil Jones tweeted a reply to Simon Wood, a Masterchef-winning restaurateur who had used Twitter to flag up the presence of the Manchester United defender in his premises earlier that evening. “Fantastic food,” wrote Phil, by way of acknowledgement for the shout-out. “Me and the wife will be back soon. Thank you.”
It was in keeping with the kind of mundane to and fro in which Jones occasionally engaged on a social media account that seemed to be curated by the player himself rather than a team of in-house social media strategists. Promotional tweets, presumably posted at the behest of his sponsors Adidas, were occasionally punctuated by birthday greetings and other supportive messages for strangers and colleagues alike. Not the kind of content a man would expect to get his two million followers exercised.