We may finally have an answer to what’s been going on with the domain for RNYFC, and it’s a bit sillier than I could have ever imagined.
If you haven’t been keeping track, in January the domain that had been redirecting to an MLSNP page for the last two years went dark. It moved around between a few different hosts and then went up for auction on GoDaddy. It sold for over $10,000 and then went into a bit of limbo before going to a Europe-based registrar.
Today, the site went live with AI-generated pictures and generic text about a European team. There is a team of 4 people shown above who aren’t real, and the tagline for the page as of the publishing date is “As a Professional Dublin Wedding Photographer, i [sic]had a chance to photograph many football teams, matches, and individual portraits.” The team is apparently now based in the UK (notably not part of Europe after Brexit), and all the players shown happen to play for teams that aren’t RNYFC. The only RNYFC-related item is the emoticon of the old RNYFC logo.
This leaves two basic outcomes:
- We are all being trolled by the former UK wing of RNYFC. The auction likely wasn’t completed, and it is now being used as a joke. This may be updated at some point with real information.
- Someone saw that there was a domain with random letters ending in FC, bought it for way too much money, and created a site meant to get people to do something, but what isn’t clear.
As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think the Dworkins are involved in this. Getting way too technical in how domain registrations work, it would have required the following process to change hands to the Dworkins.
- UK branch of RNYFC renews the domain
- UK branch of RNYFC transferred the domain to Dworkin’s GoDaddy account
- The Dworkin’s auction off the domain
- The UK branch of RNYFC buys the domain back
There is no way the Dworkin’s got the domain without this process happening as there is a 89-day process for someone to buy a domain that’s expired. The Dworkin’s never owned the domain, as this was owned by the UK side. We are also seeing life on the RhinosSoccer.com domain which now has a blank landing page, and as reported last week the old e-mail service used by RNYFC.com is hosted there as well. Its unlikely they would have done anything here.
As I've been writing this article, I'm seeing small edits happen on the page, so what is going on might be clarified in a few hours or days. As always, valiant33.com/ will be one of the places that reports on this.