The Worst Tweet In The Short History Of Tweets

Arsenal, like most every sports team in the Western world, does charitable work - their players partner with charities, the team links up with one main charity a season and works on projects with them, that sort of thing. It's a pretty standard thing in the business world, companies do this sort of thing all the time, and it's a nice side effect of being a globally successful enterprise.

A few years ago, Arsenal partnered with Great Ormond St Hospital, a renowned, outstanding children's hospital in London, which is also known as the hospital which to this day receives all the publishing royalties from JM Barrie's Peter Pan books. Arsenal sent representatives to the hospital today to celebrate the fact that Arsenal has raised over £800,000 for the hospital. As with most occasions like this, it's good PR so there was some press there. One of the press gang in attendance was Oliver Kay, of the Times. His tweet from the event?

Good to visit @GreatOrmondSt hospital today to see benefits of £800,000 raised by Arsenal fans, players, staff. Not a trophy, but great work

I'm not going to link directly to it because I don't want to provide him any traffic. Let's recap, shall we? Company makes lots of money, company decides to give some of that money to a hospital for sick children. A few years later, company visits hospital for sick children to see how things are going and spread some goodwill. Unthinking journalist then takes this opportunity to take a dig at Arsenal for not winning a trophy.

/cue sound of needle scratching across record

We at TSF can't really believe how ridiculous that is. Mr. Kay chose to take this opportunity to show the world what a tool he was, instead of talking about some kids hanging out with the club that has given their hospital a rather large amount of money in the last few years. NOBODY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT TROPHIES IN THIS CASE. It's unfair to the staff, to the hospital, to the kids, and to Arsenal, and even for sports journalism, it's pretty freakin' low.

To be fair, Kay did later apologize (again, I'm not linking to him, but he's @oliverkaytimes if you want to find it yourself), but still, the fact that he felt the need to make a stupid, lazy, pointless "ARSENAL CAN'T WIN TEH TROPHEEZ" joke on the occasion of him visiting a children's hospital is pretty freakin' sad.

We would like to take this opportunity to, once again, demand the head of the ARSENAL DOESN'T WIN TROPHIES meme on a pike outside the castle walls. Lots of teams don't win trophies. More teams don't than do. And when the ADWT meme has infected people so much that they feel it's OK to derail a story about a non-footballing visit to a children's hospital, can't we all agree the meme needs to die ASAP?