Charlton confess to staging on-pitch sex for publicity stunt
Charlton have admitted that the furore caused by footage of a couple getting intimate on their pitch was a publicity stunt of their own making.
A video which appeared to show a man and woman having sex on the centre circle at the Valley went viral on Thursday, with more than a million views of it on Vine alone.
It had been suggested that the amorous pair may have broken into the South London ground, but Charlton confessed all on Thursday night.
The Championship club are hiring out their pitch for fans to play on in the summer and launched the offer on their website under the headline “Score at the Valley”.
And, with the club having had their fun with the video, commercial manager Mark Hassan-Ali said: “We wanted to launch our pitch-hire programme with a viral that would make football fans laugh.
“We released some ‘CCTV’ footage earlier in the week of a young couple on the pitch in a rather amorous situation.
“We then decided to own up and explain that it was set up by us to launch our pitch-hire campaign. The feedback has been great and we can confirm that the young couple will be attending our next home match.”
But not everyone was tickled by the stunt.
Not sex addicts
A fan of the club nicknamed the Addicks fumed: “We are the Addicks — not the sex addicts!”
Stories of couples having sex on a football pitch are not uncommon, though.
Two Brondby fans decided to liven up the action on the pitch themselves after a dull 0-0 draw with Randers in 2013 — under the floodlights.
It also happened in Croatia in 2009.
Dinamo Zagreb defender Dino Drpic and his wife Nives Celsiu, a Playboy model, did it, too, at the centre spot of the Zagreb Stadium.
Nives later revealed in an interview to promote her book, The Naked Truth, that Drpic even arranged for the floodlights to be left on.
“Dino had arranged that people should turn on the stadium lights for us and he finally fulfilled his dream of having sex in the middle of a football pitch. It was very naughty.”
Drpic was then transfer-listed by his club, although the player subsequently denied that the romp was the cause of it.
Sources: PA Sport, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror
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