Metro recently reported an embarrassing decorating mix-up: A shop charged with creating commemorative merchandise of this year’s English World Cup Team mistook President Barack Obama for Chris Smalling, a defender on the team, and printed the president’s face on some commemorative mugs instead of the player’s.
The mistake was made public by English wholesaler Wholesale Clearance UK, who purchased the mugs from a vendor based out of Dorset. The wholesale company is currently protecting the vendor’s identity, but has stated on its website that the vendor made the decorating error after botching a Google image search for Smalling. Said the website:
“The apprentice claims that he used that well-known search engine, Google, to source the pictures. The thing is he’s more of a rugby fan and not very clued up on football. Suffice to say that when he Google image searched ‘Chris Smalling,’ he copied the first picture he liked the look of and the result was that the president of the United States has ended up on an England cup instead of the English defender.”
As of this writing, a job lot of 2,000 mugs is being sold for $3,396.76, with a single misprinted mug going for $20.38.
Pictures of the misprinted mugs can be found on the Metro article: D’oh! Hapless World Cup souvenir sellers confuse Barack Obama with England’s Chris Smalling.
