Dide: Who is the masked Premier League rapper?
- Published
As if the Premier League isn't exciting enough this season, one footballer seems to have found time to secretly drop a rap track.
The song Thrill was released by the masked artist Dide on YouTube and already has more than 500,000 views.
Footy fans will be quick to tell you there isn't a Prem star called Dide - driving people wild on social media as they guess who the musician is.
So who is the mystery top-flight rapper, and is the song any good?
Some of the names being thrown around by fans so far include Arsenal striker Eddie Nketiah - with fans saying the name Dide is an anagram of Eddi.
Others say it's definitely a Gunners player because the lyrics include lines like "my team stay winning" and "every game is like a final" - referring to their title race with Manchester City.
The music video is also set in London, leading some people to suggest it's Crystal Palace star Wilfried Zaha or recent Chelsea signing Noni Madueke.
Dide first appeared on Instagram earlier this year, external with his bio saying: "Rapper at home. Footballer on the pitch."
He's just posted a new picture with the caption "it's about time we think outside of the box" - suggesting he isn't a striker like Nketiah.
Some Prem stars have ruled themselves out already too, with Michail Antonio and Callum Wilson both saying it wasn't them in their Footballer's Football Podcast.
"Obviously, he says south London, big time Premier League player, I got my own money, so it ain't me," Antonio says.
"I don't think it's Wilfried Zaha, his body shape could be Nketiah."
The truth is no-one has a clue who Dide is yet, so we asked an expert, Radio 1Xtra DJ Kenny Allstar, who he thinks the mystery rapper could be.
Kenny, who was recently announced as the host of the Radio 1 Rap Show, thinks the Insta post might be a red herring.
"I'm going to go with the Arsenal forward Eddie Nketiah," he tells BBC Newsbeat.
"It's just giving me Nketiah vibes - I think it's him."
AJD, a music producer and BBC Asian Network DJ, agrees with Kenny and thinks Dide is Nketiah.
"It seems like a London-based accent and he's following [music producer] Steel Banglez who is also London-based," he says.
Someone who isn't 100% sure about Dide's real identity is barber to the stars Justin Carr - who's trimmed the likes of Dele Alli and Kyle Walker.
"I've heard the song and I've seen the mask, I'm rating it," he says.
"I trim a lot of players but no-one has been rapping in my chair."
That's what the rap DJ and the celeb barber thinks, but what about the experts?
We asked artificial intelligence researcher Matt to try and find out if the rapper was one of the players everyone's guessing.
After extracting the vocals from the track Thrill he trained his high-tech AI systems to test it against audio of some the footballers speaking.
He says his system is "between 80-98% confident" that the rapper is the person most people are guessing - Nketiah - rather than Zaha or Madueke.
"What I do is I cut the Dide vocal up into one second fragments and basically between 10% and 20% of those fragments sound like Wilf [Zaha], whereas most of them sound like Eddie [Nketiah]," he says.
But Matt is quick to point out that his system isn't perfect and you'd need to do more tests to be 100% sure.
"Normally you'd be quite careful about cleaning your data," he says. "I just ripped it out and cut it up really quickly.
"So I haven't done the perfect job here. But it looks pretty confident."
Whoever Dide is, it seems he's taking the rap game seriously - he's set up a website, external selling merch like T-shirts for £49.99.
On the site it says he is from the UK and "keeps his Premier League football life separate from his evocative music by donning a rose-adorned disguise".
We reached out to Dide via his manager who said he wasn't giving interviews but would keep in touch - so watch this space.
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