Chris Smalling has taken to social media to respond to 'fake quotes' he supposedly said about Lionel Messi .
Manchester United have been drawn to face Barcelona in the quarter-finals of the Champions League and although the fixture is weeks away the build-up is already intense.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's return to the Nou Camp twenty years on from the treble has already been endlessly referenced, but strangely enough it is dubious quotes from Smalling which have really gathered traction.
Earlier in the week a number of high-profile fan accounts on Twitter began sharing outlandish claims from Smalling ahead of his duel with Messi over the two-legged tie.
An unattributed quote from the English defender read: "There is a weakness in Messi that only I know about. I don't think the world is aware of that, so I'm not going to talk about it now."
Despite there being no substance to the quotes, it didn't stop the bizarre claims from going viral and being shared thousands of times over social media.
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One particular Twitter account called 'Football Daily' shared the quote, to which the 29-year-old replied: "#fakequote #fakenews."
Smalling also followed it up by releasing a video on social media which compiled all the fake quotes followed by a video of him laughing.
Although the quote was quite clearly a fake, it was in fact based on a similarly outlandish claim from Fulham forward Ryan Babel who insisted that he knew a weakness about Virgil van Dijk.
Speaking about his international teammate in the build-up to Fulham's 2-1 loss to Liverpool at the weekend, Babel said: "He does have a weakness, I don't want to say what it is. I don't think in the Premier League anyone has made that aware yet."
