On January 8th, 2014, a Scout Report was published on our website on Ajax’ Davy Klaassen by one of our writers. After the article went up it was brought to our notice by Peter McVitie (@PeterMcVitie), Editor of BeNeFoot.com that the article had content which was published by him on BeNeFoot.com in his piece “A Klaas act: Davy Klaassen emerges as a key to Ajax’s future” (dated 7th December 2013). We removed the article immediately upon learning this.
At this point of time we would like to formally apologise to Peter McVitie and the entire team at BeNeFoot.com about this incident. While we were unaware of the plagiarism at this point of time, it was our duty as editors of this site that we ensure all the content on the website is original and nothing has been plagiarised from someone else’ work. It was our duty and responsibility which we failed to carry out effectively and for that we truly apologise.
We understand the hard-work that goes into every article and we too have been victims of this in the past and understand the pure frustration it causes the writer. There is absolutely no excuse for this sort of behaviour and we sincerely apologise for the distress caused to Peter McVitite, Benefoot.com and football readers in general. This is completely unacceptable and it should never have been done.
OutsideoftheBoot.com is completely against plagiarism and this was an isolated incident. We completely understand the gravity of the situation and we can assure you that it is being dealt with. We will ensure from now on and in the future that such incidents never take place again. We do not entice readers towards our site purely to get hits, that has never been our intention.
We hold Peter McVitie in high regard, and consider him to be an Eredivise expert. So much so that we have regularly asked for his views to include in our Scout Reports of Eredivise talents under the ‘Expert Views’ section of the article. We would never perform such an act against him or any other writer who spends his valuable time in creating quality content for readers.
We once again offer our sincere apologies to everyone affected by this incident.
We can completely assure you that this won’t take place ever again.
Please accept this as our apology Peter McVitie, the entire team of BeNeFoot.com and all readers.
— The OOTB Team