Football’s biggest legal storm in years has produced an unlikely talking point: a man not blinking. Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano addressed staff in a video message after the club were found guilty on 114 of 115 Premier League charges.
The message was meant to be defiant and reassuring but many viewers focused on something else instead, which is that he appeared not to blink for nearly three minutes. Others said his eyes barely seemed to move either. The clip has since sparked AI theories, teleprompter theories and a debate about what is normal for the human eye.
Ferran Soriano is a Spanish football executive and the chief executive of Manchester City. Born in Barcelona on 16 June 1967, he studied business and holds an MBA. He served as Barcelona’s economy vice president from 2003 to 2008. He was appointed City’s chief executive on 1 September 2012. His 2011 book, Goal, set out his ideas on running a football club, and commentators have drawn parallels with how City Football Group operates.
So what does science say about blinking? A peer-reviewed study of 24 healthy students tracked their blinking with a wearable eye-tracking headset. They completed six reading tasks, including printed text, a laptop, a TV and a smartphone, plus two non-reading tasks, conversation and walking. Blink rate averaged about 10.7 a minute while reading, with wide variation between people, against about 32 a minute in conversation and about 31 while walking. The average gap between blinks stretched to about 9.6 seconds during reading, compared with under two seconds in conversation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36763349/: Man City CEO Ferran Soriano Makes Fans Uneasy By Going 3 Minutes Without BlinkingThat is why many viewers pointed to a teleprompter. Reading a script into a camera is a sustained reading task, so a big drop in blinking is normal. Still, three minutes with no blink at all is far beyond the average gap of about 9.6 seconds seen during reading in that study. Claims of no eye movement at all are harder to judge, because viewers disagreed about whether his eyes moved. So the honest answer is that it is unusual, but science does not say it proves the video is fake or that he was being dishonest.
People on social media had plenty to say. Some posted jokes, with one reply saying it was all they could see now. Another fan asked how they had never heard of the club’s CEO, saying they had only ever seen the chairman. Others declared the video “definitely AI”, and a sports journalist wrote that it was at the very least AI-enhanced, or that Soriano had gone more than three minutes without blinking.One viewer put it bluntly, “Can’t believe the Manchester City CEO Ferran Soriano released an AI video with no blinking and no eye movement for 3 whole minutes”
Others offered explanations. One viewer said a teleprompter often produces exactly this, with sustained focus that suppresses full blinks and small eye shifts tracking the scrolling text, which is common in prepared speeches. Another shared an AI-generated search summary claiming people blink less while lying and then in a flurry afterwards. That does echo real lab research, including a 2008 study in which liars blinked less during a lie and more afterwards, but later work has been mixed, with one study finding no change in an interview setting. Those studies tested people answering questions, not executives reading a prepared message, so they cannot tell us whether Soriano’s account is true, and the club denies any wrongdoing.
The Sky News encounter added another twist to the blinking debate. On 29 September, after the Premier League confirmed the verdict, Sky News reporter Rob Harris tried to interview Soriano and put questions to him. Soriano declined to answer and walked away. In that short clip, his blinking and eye movements are visible, unlike in the staff video. That contrast fits the teleprompter explanation, though it does not prove it.
The blinking will fade as a talking point, but the legal fight will not. No evidence has been published that the video was AI-generated or altered, so the explanations offered by viewers remain theories. Only a frame-by-frame review of the original footage could show whether he blinked, and when. City insist they have done nothing wrong and will challenge the findings on appeal. Until then, one very still video will keep people talking.
