Dide: Who is the masked Premier League rapper? One football player appears to have found time to quietly release a rap song this season as if the Premier League weren’t fascinating enough.
The anonymous artist Dide posted the song Thrill on YouTube, where it has received more than 500,000 views.
Football aficionados will quickly point out that there isn’t a Premier League player named Dide, which has caused a social media frenzy as people try to identify the singer.
So who is the unidentified top-tier rapper, and how do you like the song?
striker Eddie Nketiah is among the names being bandied about by fans so far. According to supporters, the name Dide is an anagram of Eddi.
Others assert that the singer is a Gunners player because the song’s lyrics, which refer to their title rivalry with Manchester City, state things like “my team stays winning” and “every game is like a final.”
Dide: Who is the masked Premier League rapper?
Since the music video is also set in London, some have speculated that the actor may be Noni Madueke, a recent Chelsea recruit, or Wilfried Zaha, a star player for Crystal Palace.
Dide debuted his Instagram earlier this year with the following bio: “rap artist at home. A football player on the field.”
With the comment, “it’s about time we thought outside of the box,” he recently shared a fresh image, implying that he is not a striker like Nketiah.
Some Premier League stars have already eliminated themselves, like Callum Wilson and Michail Antonio, who both stated in their Footballer’s Football Podcast that it wasn’t them.
Antonio responds, “Clearly, he says South London, big-time Premier League player, I got my own money, therefore it ain’t me.”
“I don’t believe it’s Wilfried Zaha; his body may be Nketiah’s,” the speaker said.
Nobody knows who Dide is, so we asked a specialist, Radio 1Xtra DJ Kenny Allstar, who he believes the unidentified rapper might be.
Kenny, who was just named the Radio 1 Rap Show host, believes the Instagram image might be a misleading lead.
He tells BBC Newsbeat, “I’m going to pick the Arsenal attacker Eddie Nketiah.”
“I simply get Nketiah vibes from it. Therefore, I guess it’s him.”
Producer of music and BBC Asian Network DJ AJD concurs with Kenny and believes Dide to be Nketiah.
He’s following [music producer] Steel Banglez, who is also located in London and has what sounds like a London accent, the man claims.
Justin Carr, a celebrity barber who has cut the hair of people like Dele Alli and Kyle Walker, isn’t entirely certain of Dide’s true identity.
He states, “I’ve heard the song and seen the mask, and I’m grading it.
“I cut a lot of players, but nobody has been banging on my chair,” the coach said.
The rap DJ and the celebrity barber believe so, but what do the experts think?
We asked Matt, a researcher in artificial intelligence, to see if the rapper was one of the players everyone was speculating about.
After extracting the vocals from the tune Thrill, he trained his sophisticated AI systems to test them against audio of some of the footballers speaking.
In contrast to Zaha or Madueke, he claims his algorithm is “between 80-98% confident” that the rapper is Nketiah, who most people are guessing.
